US Insanity and Translations

[selkie1964]

No: HPFGUIDX 43194

bboy_mn wrote

>A while back, I start a thread about how stupid I thought it was to
>translate people surnames when translating the book into other
>languages. The worst example was Professor DUMBledore being changed 
>to Professor Silencio in Italian. My name is my name regardless of
>where I am in the world. But some people debate that opinion.


Actually, since JKR has gone to such a great deal of trouble to use 
names that have a level of meaning beyond being someone's "handle," I 
think it makes a great deal of sense to translate them for the benefit 
of non-speakers of English -- to not do so would be ethnocentric.  
These books were primarily written for children, not linguistic 
scholars, so I would think that everything possible would be done to 
make the experience of reading them as similar as possible for 
everyone concerned -- including all the richness of connotation we've 
all come to know and love (and endlessly debate ;-).

While it is true that *your* name is your name wherever you are, bear 
in mind that you are a real person whereas the characters in the HP 
books are literary constructs (i.e., not real people) in a work of 
literature.  Since Albus Dumbledore et al. are literary constructs, it 
really doesn't "affect" them to have their names changed (as it would, 
in a very real sense, affect you and me to have our names changed) for 
the sake of clarifying aspects of character for readers in another 
country.  Also, as a literary construct, a character's name affects 
how he is perceived by members of another culture/speakers of another 
language.  It's also possible that the actual word "dumbledore" (and 
other names, natch) has connotations in other languages that are 
inappropriate to the character (for instance, in French, although I 
don't know what dumble might connote, the sound "dore" -- or "d'or" -- 
translates as "of gold" -- I'm not saying that's inappropriate, just 
using it as an instance in which a sound could have a different 
meaning/connotation in another language).

I'm reminded of the Tintin comic books by Herge.  One of the 
characters in the original French is Tryphon Tournesol -- a name which 
connotes precisely bupkus to the average English reader.  However, 
once you know his name in the English version is Cuthbert Calculus, 
you all of a sudden have some insight into the character without 
knowing a single thing about him (in the books, he's a profoundly 
hard-of-hearing, absent-minded professor/inventor type -- extremely 
fussy, somewhat vain, courtly and genteel when he remembers to be, a 
bit prudish, not really with it socially, etc., etc., etc.)

In the final analysis, I sincerely doubt that the publishers changed 
important things like names in JKR's books without her input (or at 
the very least, her permission).  For one thing, since she owns the 
copyright, that could open them up to some very damaging lawsuits.

selkie1964