As Peter Constantine remarks in his translator's note, there is no single "Babelian" mode, filled as the stories are with blunt realism, lyrical romanticism, stark sorrow and sly humor.
In a reminiscence in his 2009 collection "Oranges and Peanuts for Sale," the essayist and translator Eliot Weinberger remarked, "Laughlin's wealth let New Directions survive as a money-loser into the 1960s, until the moment when yesterday's obscure gibberish became today's course requirement...
My translator's phone rang.
In his 1931 essay on Proust, Samuel Beckett, a pre-eminent modernist novelist-translator, quoted and translated a remark from Proust's Le temps retrouvé, adding his own comments in parentheses: "The duty and the task of a writer (not an artist, a writer) are those of a translator".
Mr. Putin's remarks were interpreted by a translator.
Later, however, the government issued a clarification, insisting that Mr. Wei's remarks were flubbed by his translator.
Each pair's remarks were discussed between the research team and translators, with further adjustments made as outlined in the results section below.
Najib departed, and the translator remarked that it was inconceivable for a warlord's bodyguard to be friends with a wedding singer.
In some ways, Mr. Lee -- at least as a translator rendered his remarks -- was more blunt than Mr. Obama, while making the same points.
