Translation and Cultural Issues

racjom racjom at yahoo.co.uk
Mon Jan 28 03:23:02 UTC 2002


No: HPFGUIDX 34172

delurks

I'm from Slovenia and I must say that I'm quite happy with our 
translation. It does have certain little problems and there are some 
differences and of course the original is better, but I like it 
anyway. 

The thing that bothered me in the Slovenian HP translation is that 
the names of spells, curses in the original all seem to come from 
Latin and sometimes some English additions. A good translated one IMO 
is Expeliarmus! = Zroxis! (z = short for ''out of'', roka = a hand, 
and a latin or foreign sound is added with the suffix –is and with 
the letter x, which doesn't exist in Slovene alphabet), however some 
of the new ones in GoF were translated as imperative form of the verb 
and I am really annoyed by it. It doesn't sound like a magical word 
to me at all. I'm taking points from the translator's house for that!

What I like in the translation are the names' translations. So they 
aren't completely faithfull to the original, but I don't always 
understand the meaning of the name in English.  The thing he usually 
does is, he takes a Slovene word, sometimes he plays with it a bit 
and spells it in a weird English. So you don't usually get the 
meaning untill you read it out loud. They're fun. One that really 
made me laugh was in GoF that I read in the original first. Crouch 
calls Percy ''Weatherby''. To me that in itself is not funny at all 
(only the twins make it a joke). But translator chose  Puysie, which 
sounds similar to Percy and the meaning is what you would call a pet 
pig :) (Piggy). The translator knew when to change the names and when 
not (Sirius, Dumbledore and some others stayed the same and in the 
trio only Hermione was changed to Hermiona, since all female names in 
Slovene end with –a)

Some things are untranslatable. I'm so sorry right now, because I 
can't think of examples of jokes right now. I can't remember what 
happened with the Uranus in Slovene
 Grr why don't I have the book 
here!?

The only part of the books I compared word by word was the mirror 
scene and I felt much more emotion in the original based only on the  
words that described Harry's emotions. Also I found the atmosphere in 
the GoF much darker than in the translation. I think that the 
difference is in the details. As Freud wrote in a very interesting 
text I  read for my History of Art class two years ago the raplicas 
of great works of art can be very much like the original from a 
faraway look, but the real difference is visible from the closer 
look –in the details the great artist's touch can't be faked. 

The cultural background of the books is of course English. The 
translation could in no way be put in our country. There are no 
boarding scools here (there are dorms for those who live further away 
from the schools and don't want to have to drive to school every day, 
but they go home for the weekends). The houses and perfects and Head 
Boy/Girl– we don't really have the equivalent. There is the student 
representative
 but that is not the same thing. There are also some 
of the holiday festivities that are different – like the crackers at 
christmas (not a custom here). The Bertie Bott's every flavour 
beans  - I recently ate jelly beans for the first time when a friend 
brought some over from London (you don't get them around here) and I 
thought to myself  ''Oh, this is what JKR thought of, when she was 
making them up!'' 

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...) 
I can only agree with this. It's probably because I live in a 
country, where being a different rase is so rare it's exotic. (There 
was only one black person (no asian) in my year in my primary school 
and the same happened in highschool.)

What I really would like to know is how the German and Spanish 
speaking members of this group liked their translations. I'm thinking 
of perhaps reading one of them – that is, if I'll find them in the 
library. (A good excuse to reread the series : I'm practising the 
language:) Although I'm not entirely sure that putting another set of 
names in my head is a good idea, I am having trouble with two 
already! The English won the battle because of this list and when I 
talk with my Slovenian friends, who mostly read only the 
translations, in my mind things go something like this: wait, who's 
Raws again? oh right: Snape.

Mojca (who could go on and on, but really needs to go to sleep now – 
it's 4 a.m.)
By the way: my first post here – hi everyone!

*relurks*






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