Lost in translation

[kkersey_austin]

justcarol67 wrote:
> ...and I'd be
> interested in hearing more on the subject from anyone who's read any
> of the books in translation. What bothers you most about them, and
> what do you think the HP/WW experience is like for readers, mostly
> children, who read the books only in translation? What are they
> missing and which elements of the translations are potentially 
> misleading?

I'll confess that I am for all practical purposes monolinguistic so I
haven't read any HP in translation. (I was excited to hear about the
classic Greek translation, but it has been more than two decades since
I studied Greek and I'm afraid at this point it would be, well, all
Greek to me!) However, I'm never one to let a bit of ignorance
interfere with my wading into a discussion. :-)

Anyway, last summer there was a thread about translations - I posted a
link to an Umberto Eco essay, in which he discusses the very point you
bring up, about missing/misleading elements that are lost (or gained)
in translation; you can find it here:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-OTChatter/message/30574

Another interesting discussion of translation issues can be found in
Douglas Hofstadter's amazing book, "Godel Escher Bach". The subject of
discussion is the translations into French and German of Lewis
Carrol's poem "Jabberwocky", which is full of invented and nonsense
words which nevertheless trigger a sense of meaning in the reader. 

"... in a poem of this type, many "words" do not carry ordinary
meaning, but act purely as exciters of nearby symbols. However, what
is nearby in one language may be remote in another.  Thus, in the
brain of a native speaker of English, "slithy" probably activates such
symbols as "slimy", "slither", "slippery", "lithe", and "sly", to
varying extents. Does "lubricilleux" do the corresponding thing in the
brain of a Frenchman? What indeed would be "the corresponding thing"?"

It was, I suppose, an attempt to address these issues that caused the
Italian translator to mistakenly choose to substitute "Silencio" for
Dumbledore. I don't envy the task of the translators of the HP books,
who must work under short deadlines and must have to make a lot of
decisions about what the author "really" meant - and just look at how
much discussion HPfGU can wring out of a turn of phrase - take the
Prophesy, for example. 

Here's a link to the Jabberwocky thing (just skip over the
network/node stuff at the beginning if that doesn't make sense to you):
http://www76.pair.com/keithlim/jabberwocky/poem/hofstadter.html

He's also written a more recent book that is more specifically about
translation, focusing on a single French poem which is translated over
and over with different approaches by different people. I haven't read
it yet, myself. I did hear Hofstadter lecture in the early 1980's
during the time GEB was being translated into Chinese - a daunting
task, as much of the book is about language and depends on wordplay -
anagrams, palindromes, puns, etc. to make the points.

So, just wondering, does anyone else think about the Room of
Requirement when reading this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumbolia

Elisabet