Kylie Smith
Lost in Translation
The Harry Potter series is an international best-seller and has been translated into various languages since it was first published. The reading I looked at, titled ‘The Travels of Harry: International Marketing and the Translation of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Books’, looks at how this was actually done. Translating things from one language to another is not easily done, especially when it comes to books of this length. I believe that it’s impossible to convey exactly what J. K. Rowling meant when the books are translated into other languages.
I should preface this by saying both that I think that this is true of every literary work and that this doesn’t mean that the books shouldn’t be translated or that the translators are doing a bad job. I have immense respect for someone who knows two languages well enough to be able to transcribe an entire novel written in one language to the other. These people do this work in a very short amount of time as well. For example, according to the reading “the Chinese translator was a frontrunner in the race to produce the first translation” (142). This translation would take around four months. Not only do translators have to translate the words, they need to translate the proper emotions and meanings behind things, which can be difficult to do in a lot of time, let alone four short months.
An example of how difficult this can be can be seen in the sentence “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much” (qtd. 146). This phrase conveys a little bit of sass that can be hard to convey in another language, because the ‘thank you’ isn’t actually a ‘thank you’, it’s a way of being a little haughty and stuck-up. Translators do their best to have everything keep the right tone, but this can be difficult. A German woman said that the German translation was “overall good, but loses its Britishness” (146). This seems to be a common thing throughout the books, with jokes and names that would make sense in English not having the same effect in other languages.
Another thing that could be lost is speech patterns. Hagrid’s speech, for example, is written with a lot of missing last consonants and apostrophes that’s meant to mirror a working class accent. When translated to other languages, this can be a hard thing to denote because the lower-class cockney English accent is such a part of the culture that it can be hard to replicate. Some transcriptions try to do the same thing, or mirror a similar lower class speech in their culture, while others simply ignore that and spell everything correctly. No matter what the translator chooses to do, it loses a little bit of the meaning behind it.
While translators try their best and certainly do an excellent job translating the Harry Potter series, I believe that it’s impossible to exactly translate the meaning of a novel into another language.
I really like your arguments in this. I agree that literary works lose some of their aspects when translated. I would love to see you expand your point a little further on speech patterns. Would you say that the way speech patterns are formatted in English, just generally, as compared to other languages (i.e. sentence structure) could play a large role in creating difficulties with conveying meaning, or would it not matter so much? Overall I really like your ideas and your textual supports fit in very well.
I like that you explored with the translations of the books not being as accurate. I think you could expand more on the language of certain characters. Also, some of the phrases that certain characters say may not be translated as well, such as Ron saying “bloody” all the time. You may want to explore how certain idioms can’t be translated to fit in other languages. I would like to see how translators worked with other character’s speech and accents if the article talks about it!
Hi Kylie,
I really like this journal. My German professor here at IUP actually translates books in German on the side and has talked about it with me briefly, so it was really interesting to read your view on it. I agree that the English language can be quite tricky when it comes to the way we say things in tone or with attitude. A foreigner might not get the level of sass or sarcasm we truly have in our dialogues. As a student who has taken German for almost 10 years, I can tell you just how hard it is to write a paper in another language and attempt to get some of my points across in a way that makes sense to me in both languages. While it is awesome that other countries can read these books, and enjoy them just like us, there is definitely a language difference and it’s hard to understand things such as Hagrids speech and so forth. I do believe that when these books are translated though, they kind of change the way things are and relate them to that culture or language. You could maybe even include how the U.K. and U.S. both speak english but there are different slang terms, spelling and dialect. Very interesting journal, good job!