Re: JKR’s giant mistake?

[Renee]

No: HPFGUIDX 117681


--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Tonks" <tonks_op at y...> wrote:
> 
> Very interesting research on the Voldemort name issue. You might 
be 
> onto something. Maybe when the name is used by someone other that 
> those who are not afraid of him, or are not his followers, it is 
> because they are in someway at that moment possessed by him.  Or 
> maybe by having the 's on it.. *Voldemort's followers* for 
example,  
> it is not the same as saying it directly.

Renee:
This doesn't work for translations into Romance languages like 
French, Italian and Spanish, as they use a preposition instead of a 
genitive form. It's hard to imagine that JKR, who has a degree in 
French, wouldn't have realised such a thing. 

Tonks_op: 
 Or maybe the fear in 
> others is that saying it will bring him, and the people who do say 
> it and are his followers anyway don't mind if he comes around, but 
> when he is around they show respect for him by using his title 
> instead.

Renee:
This doesn't explain Crouch Senior in the GoF Pensieve scene (the 
lack of any reactions included), let alone Pettigrew's use of the 
name in the Shrieking Shack, so shortly after he flinched when 
Sirius used it. 

My guess is that nobody used any search function at all to look for 
misplaced Voldemorts, and that JKR and the editors quite simply 
overlooked them. There are five instances of 'suspicious' use: two 
in PS/SS, one in PoA and two in Gof. That's at most two per book 
(one of which is very long) and none in two of the five books. Not 
really very much. It's easy to miss such things, even for editors or 
proofreaders. 

As a professional translator, I do a lot of proofreading of my own 
translations, I get to see the results of the editors' work and I 
read the galley proofs. I know from experience that at *all* these 
stages, mistakes still manage to slip through. Also, in the course 
of many years, I've spotted quite a few mistakes in the originals I 
translated that everyone, from the original authors to the readers 
of the galley proofs, managed to overlook. (I know this because I 
usually contact the authors when I come across something that looks 
like a mistake, and they either confirm it is one, or tell me it 
isn't.) And sometimes mistakes I didn't see were spotted by an 
editor.   

And these are not typos; we're talking about content here, and still 
such mistakes are easily made. Given the flints found elsewhere in 
the HP series, it's not unthinkable that these five suspicious 
Voldemorts have simply been overlooked. And then again, maybe not. I 
guess this is one of those instances where I *would* like to know 
what the author has to say...

Renee