Foreign-Language Quotations
How to present a quotation in a language other than the language of your text.
The standard treatment is to quote the original and supply a translation, with the original in quotation marks or as a block quote and the translation immediately after in brackets or parentheses. Which one leads depends on your reader: scholarly work usually leads with the original, general writing with the translation.
Do not italicise a full quotation simply because it is in another language. Italics mark isolated foreign words in an English sentence; a whole quoted passage is already set apart by quotation marks or indentation, and doubling the signals looks fussy.
Punctuation and quotation-mark conventions follow the language of your text, not the source. A French sentence quoted inside an English article takes English quotation marks, even though the French original used guillemets.
Common mistake: silently repairing accents or spelling. Reproduce diacritics exactly; if the source itself is wrong, use [sic] or a bracketed correction rather than an invisible fix. Always credit the translator, including yourself ('my translation').
“"Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point" ("The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing").”
Keep reading the glossary
Naming the translator, because a quotation in translation is also that translator's wording.
The angled quotation marks « … » used in French, Russian, Italian, and several other languages.
How faithfully a translated quote preserves the meaning and music of the original.
Latin for 'thus' — used in quotes to mark an error reproduced from the original.