Professor Sinistra/Canon and non-canon

[grey_wolf_c]

No: HPFGUIDX 38966

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., "drjennyfer" <drjennyfer at h...> wrote:
> Sorry if this has been mentioned before - I can't read ALL the 
> posts.
> Reading around the posts, and also in the lexicon, I'm confused. Why 
> all the confusion over Professor Sinistra's gender? She was dancing 
> with Moody at the Yule Ball in GoF (sorry - don't have the ref/quote 
> handy). I think it was something like they were "doing an ungainly 
> two-step." Is this canon proof that Sinistra is female? I suppose she 
> could technically be male, but isn't that geting a bit far-fetched?
> Is she referred to as he/she in any of the translated editions? But
> then, I don't think they count as canon (and I'm not trying to start that 
> debate!)
> 
> Jen

Good little piece of evidence in favor of Sinistra's gender. I don't 
think it's been mentioned before, either (but as you say, I don't think 
anyone has read ALL the posts). As a matter of fact, my (translatd) 
edition, into a language that, unlike English, has genders, Sinistra 
is, in fact, determined as female, on the line of the "techeress" 
Sinistra, IIRC. I myself have always thought of her as female, 
obviously, but I've refrained from commenting it as canon, for several 
reasons.

The first reason, as I said in my previous post, is that translated 
editions of the books are not Canon by Alberfoth's Goat scale, and I 
respect that. There is a second reason, however, much more important: 
I've worked as a translator for an editorial and, although I didn't 
translate fiction but technical texts, I've seen (and had to do myself) 
the sort of logical (and sometimes faith) jumps one has to do to 
translate even the easiest piece of text. So much information is 
generally accepted as "already known" by authors that when translating 
you just have to put in your own ideas, especially if some of that 
information (as in this case) has to be transformed from implied to 
explained.

Resuming: the low line is that translators have to invent many things 
when translating. Sometimes, the author is available for consultation 
(or so I'm told; I never could contact any of the authors myself), but 
most of the time it's the tranlator the one who is supposed to piece 
the bits toghether, and put in the missing piece by making it match as 
much as possible.

As a result, I deeply mistrust any sort of translated work, since you 
never know when the tranlators could've changed the original. If you 
don't believe me, I've got 23 recorded examples in a single series of 
books (The Belgariad) where the tranlators changed phrases, speakers, 
or simply cutted full paragraphs when tranlating into my language. 
After that, I decided I was never reading the series in anything but 
the original language ever again.

Anyway, to answer the question: Are translated books canon? 
I wouldn't accept it in most cases, but I could make an exception in 
this particular case, since JKR since the sort of busy-body person that 
would take personal interest in the correct translation of her books 
(as she took personal interest on the film-which-must-not-be-named). If 
she WAS available for this sort of qustions ("excuse me, Mrs. Rowling, 
but I need to know whether the teacher Sinistra is male"), they could 
be considered almost canon (maybe a 3.7 or so in the Alberfoth's 
scale).

The counter argument for this is the fact that names finishing in "a" 
in my language are subsconciously asociated with Female names, so the 
translators could just have made the jump on their own without 
consulting anyone. The counter against this is the fact that surnames 
don't follow that particular rule.

Hope that helps,

Grey Wolf