lost in translation: Harry Potter

With just four weeks left until Spain, I've shifted my focus from bolstering my English lexicon to refreshing my grasp on Spanish. My fluency has definitely suffered now that I've been away from Granada for over a year. What's more, I no longer work at my UCSB job surrounded by Mexican cooks. To revive my vocabulary, including the all-important words "wand" and "curse," I've taken to re-reading the Harry Potter series in Spanish.

Doing so has shed light onto the trials of literary translation, especially when dealing with such sacred appellations and plot developments as appear in J.K. Rowling's books--translated into more than 70 languages worldwide. In her books, there are certain creations, such as the Pensieve or Knockturn Alley, that are extremely difficult to translate due to the sort of play-on-words that Rowling invokes to create such terms (i.e., Pensieve is basically a bowl of thoughts, or a "pensive sieve"). Translators must choose to either forgo the underlying connotations and stick with a phrase that will appear random to most readers, or figure out a way in their own language to convey such double meanings.

Other such ingenuities, like many characters' names and spells, would also be lost in translation. Although this does not affect the plot, it certainly dissolves some of the magic of the books. Many incantations are based on Latin roots, such as lumos (to light a wand), imperio (to control sombody), and priori incantatem (reproducing the last spell of the wand). Names often provide insight into the characters themselves--Draco Malfoy is based off the Latin root for dragon, while Remus Lupin draws his surname from the Latin for wolf. Luckily, these terms go over fine in a majority of translations, since a large chunk of the foreign market plays out in Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese), all based off Latin. But it's a whole level of ingenuity lost on the poor Arabic or Russian reader!

And lastly, what I just stumbled upon in my reading and what inspired this post, is how the different translations deal with anagrams. In Chamber of Secrets, Tom Marvolo Riddle rearranges the letters of his name to spell out "I am Lord Voldemort." In the version I'm reading, the translator had to compensate for the fact that "I am" is "soy" in Spanish, and thus changed Tom's name to "Tom Sorvolo Ryddle" throughout the whole series. Many languages can accomplish this by only changing the middle name--Servolo in Brazilian Portuguese, Vandrolo in Hebrew, Marvoldo in Turkish, Vorlost in German. Other languages, like Norwegian and French, simply replace the entire name so that the letters are able to spell out "I am Lord Voldemort" in the respective languages. (In Icelandic, for example, his name becomes Trevor Delgome--sort of has a different feel to it, doesn't it?)

But apparently, some languages pose too mountainous a task. The translators of Mandarin, for example, went about their business with the appropriate Chinese characters, and then made a footnote at the bottom: "In English, 汤姆･马沃罗･里德尔 is 'Tom Marvolo Riddle.' The letters in this name are exactly the same as those in 我是伏地魔 'I am Lord Voldemort,' arranged in a different order!" (source) In the Arabic version, the author threw out the whole word game altogether, and had the character simply write "I am Lord Voldemort" out of thin air. Less awe-factor, sure, but also less hassle. After all, this scene occurs at the end of the book--can we blame the translators for just wanting to be done with it?

So there you have it! Important linguistic insight into the greatest series of all time. Or, several hours of Harry Potter research, in lieu of deep-cleaning my room or taking GRE practice tests.

Source

P.S. More lost in translation moments