Wizard weddings and lifespans, translation issues

[Tabouli]

No: HPFGUIDX 34147

Terri:
> The current (1990) statistical age for marriage is 25 for women, and 27 for men.

The other thing that intrigues me is the lifespan question.  At what point do wizards start ageing slower than Muggles?  They're considered of age at 17, and from available evidence, are known to marry and have kids in their late teens and early twenties, at least in the late seventies.  By British Muggle standards in the same era, (was it the 1970s when the age of legal adulthood was reduced from 21 to 18?) I'd say these ages are both a bit on the young side.  By contrast, wizards seem to live substantially longer than muggles... Dumbledore is still kicking away at 150.  Perhaps the ageing slowdown starts around 20?  Another thought - if wizards marry at 20, they might have 130 years or more of married life to live!  Phew!  Makes you think, eh?

--jenny from ravenclaw, wondering if Tabouli has an acronym for those 
of not who are *not* Hagrid fans ************

Ever ready to oblige.  Let's see.  Can I assume that anti-Hagrid types find him irritating?  How about:

I.R.R.I.T.A.N.T. (Indiscreet Rubeus Represents Irresponsibility, Teacherly Abandon and Needless Tippling)?

Alexander:
> What Uranus joke? I want to hear it, as well as the place
in the text where it's located.  There are some jokes based on play-on-words, which surely
were very different in English origin [1], so I think it's compensated.<

John's already covered this particular joke, but a couple more thoughts...

I have a little collection of copies of "Alice Through the Looking Glass" in different languages, a book which is full of double entendres and wordplay.  From these I've seen a few illustrations of managing wordplay jokes in translation.  One way is to translate directly and put in a footnote (NB: In the original English, this sentence is a play on words, where Uranus=your anus), another is to try to come up with a wordplay joke along the same lines in the language of translation (preferable, surely), and another sadly common ploy is to just translate directly with no explanation at all. In this last case, I have to wonder whether the translator missed the point (as the readers certainly will), but ah well.

How'd they go with the Sorting Hat and Hogwarts school songs?  Rhyming poetry is another challenge for the translator.  (Jabberwocky translations are always fun in my little Carrollian collection, because there are all those nonsense words to reckon with as well, though I suppose they provide a handy way of rigging the rhyming issue).  I disapprove stridently of translators who wimp out and just translate directly, without any attempt to retain rhyme or rhythm (for example in my copy of Bilbo le Hobbit the misty mountains song is just translated: I frowned darkly).  If they're not up to it, I say they should take it upon themselves to find someone who is!  Obviously maintaining regular rhyme and rhyme along with meaning will mean taking some liberties with the text, but IMO unless the exact word for word meaning is crucial, this is a lesser crime than ruining the original author's poetic intent and atmosphere (and honestly, can't they send a direct translation of their new version to the original author for comment, to ensure their liberties are OK?  Ghh.  I wonder how much consulation there is in the translation process?  Couldn't the Russian translator have asked JKR which of the sound and meaning of "Weasley" was the more important?)

The translator can make or break a new market... the first translation of Michael Ende's "Momo" from German into English was "The Grey Gentlemen", which, from the abominable attempt to translate the riddle-poem near the end I glanced at, was a shocker (not that I could read the original German, but the second translator of the novel did it so well you'd think it had been originally written in English).  Praise be that someone agreed with me and hired someone else to try again and produce what then turned out to be a popular, bestselling (?) children's book...

(any comments from the Germans on the list?  To OT, of course...)

Alexander:
> For example, it would never occur to a Russian to sit down
and calculate just how often does a female or an african (or
whoever else) appears in the books and takes an active part
in the plot. Yep, sure I know it's a hot subject "out there"
but it surely doesn't hit any strings in my own soul (almost
all issues covered by Political Correctness rule are simply
"not perceived" here in ex-USSR) [2].

Ahahaaa!  (chuffs Tabouli, who has spent many a cross-cultural training session on 'political correctness', both explaining this peculiar Anglophone concept to baffled international students and explaining to Anglophones that this concept they take for granted *really is* totally alien to most people outside the Anglophone world...)

Eloise:
>St Mungo, as someone has already said had the given name, 'Kentigern'. He 
lived cAD 518-03 and from his name I guess he was a Saxon. < 

In closing, an evil aside about the perils of translation... there have been a couple of posts from Japanese email addresses on the list in the last few weeks, which reminds me of something a Japanese friend taught me when I was in Japan... the sound "Mungo" is more or less identical to the sound of the rudest word in the Japanese language (which corresponds to the rudest word in the English language: think female intimate anatomy).  Wonder how the Japanese translator managed this one? Heh heh heh...  I once met a man called Mungo who was thinking of going to Japan to teach English (lucky for him my Japanese friend gave me a swearwords lesson, and that I met and warned him before he headed for Tokyo...)

Tabouli.


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