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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