Translation WAS Re: Dumbledore's Motives - Fanged Servant - Abroad - French

[pamscotland]

No: HPFGUIDX 40917

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., "bboy_mn" <bboy_mn at y...> wrote:
<snip> 
> Sorry to be such a jerk about this issue but it really punches my
> buttons. I have never been able to come up with even the most 
obscure
> twisted path of logic, that justifies translating a person name.

It depends what you mean by 'translate'.  Most British English 
readers would probably not know that old English 'dumbledore' 
implied 'bumble bee' until someone told them or they read it 
somewhere.  I would therefore understand a Spanish translation using 
an Old Spanish word for a bumble bee for Dumbledore's name.  

But then it gets too complicated.  We surely have to accept that 
every word written in British English has associations for people 
whose first language is British English which may not be there for 
people whose first language is something else (even if it's American 
English, Canadian English, Australian English etc.)  What those 
associations may be vary from person to person, even within the same 
language group, depending on whether or not they have had a similar 
education and background and taste in reading as JKR.  (I'm a Jane 
Austen fan and think that American readers who are also Austen fans 
understand things that British readers who are not Austen fans may 
have missed.)

I think I'm probably with you - it seems practically impossible to 
translate a piece of literature from one language to another such 
that all the words have all the same possible associations in both 
languages - no more and no less.  

The problem is almost certainly the perceived target audience for 
these books - so many people insist that they are children's books 
and therefore must not look like some academic treatise with lots of 
footnotes and appendices explaining the relationship between a 
phoenix and one of the Gunpowder Plotters or the relationship between 
Jane Austen and Filch's cat. 

So perhaps what is needed is a child's version with awkward 
translations of names that may still help the story along, and an 
adult version with copious footnotes and appendices.  I think it will 
actually happen in English eventually because at some stage in the 
future one or more of these books will become 'set books' for some 
academic examination and someone will write a learned commentary 
which will be printed on the left hand page of the special schools 
edition with JKR's original text on the right hand page with line 
numbers etc.

Pam S