10 Facts About The Harry Potter Books That You Need To Read
by N/A, 10 years ago |
3 min read
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Harry Potter may have been written by an English woman, but it's appreciated by people from all over the world!
But making it into so many different translations came with some bumps in the road...
1. Italian Harry Potter fans once protested a late release of the book by sending huge amounts of feathers to the publishers.
It was aptly named "Operation Feather."
2. Harry Potter has been translated into Latin as well as Ancient Greek.
So you can enjoy the magic in languages both living and dead!
3. Iran isn't part of the Universal Copyright Convention, so there are 16 unauthorized Harry Potter editions in Farsi.
4. Translating for Hagrid is tough because his speech is so colloquial. In Japan, Hagrid's speech is translated into a Tohoku dialect.
5. There's a scene where Sirius, in the English text, starts singing "God Rest Ye Merry Hippogriff," alluding to the Christian song. The Hebrew translation parodies a traditional Chanukah song instead.
6. Acronyms don't always work out in translations. For example, the N.E.W.T.s had to become the F.U.T.T. in the Swedish translation.
7. The mirror of Erised is spelled as such because it's "desire" backwards. In the German translation, it's the mirror of Nerhegeb.
The German word for desire is begerhren.
8. In order to come up with the acronym "I Am Lord Voldemort" when Tom Riddle's name is rearranged, the French gave him a different middle name--Elvis.
9. Since pensieve is a play on words between the words pensive and a sieve, the Swedish, German and Norwegian translations have their own words for the device.
German—Denkarium, Swedish—Minnessal, and Norwegian—Tanketank.
10. Dumbledore is translated in Italian pretty literally. Dumb is synonymous with quiet, so his name is Prof. Silente.
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