The first job I ever had was working for my dad, helping him out with some of his work as a translator - he used to take in sick lodgers who had come over from Iran to get medical assistance. It was 1975 and I was 10 at the time.

I think of myself as a translator. I just change the dry, unfeeling language of data into a visual language that allows for feeling.

I'm a good communicator, and I'm a good translator. I can talk to engineers; I can talk to people for whom technology is not remotely interesting or even maybe scary - things like that.

What the translator - myself in particular - does is not comparable to what the Homeric performer was doing.

I remember what it was like when my parents couldn't help me with my homework because they couldn't speak the language, or being a translator for my parents. I did that a lot.

I was my mother's translator until I was probably 12 years old, and I remember how people looked at her.

The barrier of communication is terrible if you don't speak the language. You cannot reach a player with a translator.

My phone is my favorite travel gadget because it has my translator.

My mom is a translator for the school district in Delaware. She'd hear these different stories from working with families there. Those stories stuck with me.

The existence of another, competing translation is a good thing, in general, and only immediately discouraging to one person - the translator who, after one, two, or three years of more or less careful work, sees another, and perhaps superior, version appear as if overnight.

I think the close work I do as a translator pays off in my writing - I'm always searching for multiple ways to say things.

The only problem was that I couldn't communicate with Dario. He speaks Italian and I don't. We had a translator the whole time. I just felt that something was lost with the go between. He was a delightful man, but I wish we could have spoken the same language.

The CIA will only hire people with impeccable credentials to be a translator. 'Impeccable credentials' means you've never lived outside the United States.

When I was doing missionary work when I was younger, which started this obsession of mine with the literature of witness, I was a translator for a missionary group, and I spent years in a Tijuana dump. People were really thrown by the fact that the Mexican poor, many of them pureblood indigenous people, seemed happy.

In poetry, I have, since very young, loved poetry in translation. The Chinese, the French, the Russians, Italians, Indians and early Celts: the formality of the translator's voice, their measured breath and anxiety moves me as it lingers over the original.

It was nice to be in my own country, where I didn't need a translator or a driver. Where I didn't need to figure out cultural references or what hijab I needed to wear to cover my hair.

My mom's a translator, my dad's a woodworker; that's the world I grew up in, that's the world I'm most comfortable in. The whole idea of Hollywood or any of that other stuff that unfortunately goes along with film, that wasn't part of my upbringing, thankfully.

If I make a speech, I need a translator. But music does not need a translation. People understand me through the sound. That I think is very important. This is just one planet, like one family.

One of my favorite poets, Neruda, writes close to the bone. Though I know only a little Spanish, I like to compare the Spanish and English lines and see how the translator worked.

As a physician and as a pilot, I think it lets me be a pretty good translator having one foot in the medical world and one foot in the flying world. Sometimes when the medical guys come in and speak medical stuff to the pilots, the pilots really don't know what they're saying.