Meaning/Translation of "stopper death"

[zanooda2]

No: HPFGUIDX 168222

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Miles" <miles at ...> wrote:

<snip>
 
> As far as I recall it, in every discussion up to now "stopper 
> death" was interpreted as 'to stop death' or 'to put a stop to 
> death'. That was my understanding as well - but yesterday I watched 
> the German version of the film, and they translated it "den Tod 
> verkorken" - that's "to cork death".
> 
> I'm not a native speaker, but this translation/understanding seems 
> to be reasonable. To brew a potion, to bottle it - and to put a 
> stopper into the bottle.

 
zanooda:

I'm not a native speaker either, so I won't even try to discuss what 
meanings the word "stopper" can have, but I can tell you that it was 
translated the same way into Russian. I wouldn't trust their 
translators much, but in this case I don't blame them, because 
English-Russian dictionaries give only one meaning of this word - 
stopper (noun) means cork, stopper (verb) means to cork a bottle. So 
they (Germans as well as Russians) just translated it literally.

I bought PS in French a couple of days ago, and their translation of 
this passage is even more straitforward. Snape says that he 
can "enfermer la mort dans un flacon". Unlike English, German and 
Russian, French include the word "flagon" (flacon) into this 
expression, so it definitely sounds like Snape puts death (mort) into 
a bottle (flacon) and then corks the bottle.

This is all just to give you information on some other languages for 
comparison, because, honestly, I don't think it is important how 
translators understood what JKR wrote, the important thing is what 
*she* meant when she wrote it :-).