Here is what some writers have said about translation:
“In order to translate context means that we must engage in extensive textual excavation and bring to bear everything we know, feel and intuit about the two languages and their literature.” (Grossman)
“The most important thing is not how words are matched on the page, but why they are matched that way, what social, literary, ideological considerations led translators to translate as they did, what they hoped to achieve bz translating as they did, whether they can be said to have achieved their goals or not, and why” (Lefevere)
“I cannot help but translate what I love, yet I resist translation into English, I never teach anything whose original I cannot read, and constantly modify printed translations, including my own” (Spivak)
“Il arrive que la traduction aide à comprendre l’original ou, plus belle que l’original, le trahisse” (Etiemble)
“Una traducción puede ser mejor que un original” (Borges)
“The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase” (Nabokov)
“In cultures that lie on the periphery of the global circulation of literary works, what is wanted is access to the centre. The cultural standing of literary works in translation is determined in the first place by the simple fact that they give access to the foreign.” (Bellos)
(كيف يقول (الجاحظ) في فقرة ان ترجمة الحكمة تشؤهها ، و في فقرة غير بعيدة إن الترجمة إن الترجمة قد تزيد حسناً؟ (كيليطو
The great charm of Burton’s translation, viewed as literature, lies in the veil of romance and exoticism he cast over the entire work. He tried hard to retain the flavour of oriental quaintness and naivete of the medieval Arab writing by writing ‘as the Arab would have written English’ (Farwell)
LIke cohesion, coherence is a network of relations which organize and create a text: cohesion is the network of surface relations which link words and expression to other words and expressions in a text, and coherence is the network of conceptual relations which underlie the surface text. (Baker)
The task of the translator consists in finding that particular intention toward the target language which produces in that language the echo of the original. This is a feature of translation that basically differentiates it from the poet’s work, because the intention of the latter is never directed toward the language as such, at its totality, but is aimed solely and immediately at the specific linguistic contextual aspects. Unlike a work of literature, translation finds itself not in the center of the language forest, but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without entering, aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the work in the alien one. (Benjamin)