zlacker

> There’s a particularly inflammatory translation of HP which causes people to swear that they won’t let their children read it.

What makes it inflammatory?

>>paulry+(OP)
That it isn’t the same translation they read as children and that was used in movies.

It is not a particularly high-brow debate, as HP, unlike Dostoyevsky in en-world, is read by everyone. People usually concentrate on proper names. Rowling uses a lot of “meaningful” names like Snape, Sprout or Ravenclaw, and translator have a choice of adapting them or leaving them be. Either choice leaves somebody unhappy. The same problem was with LotR a generation before. (LotR broke through the iron curtain only in 90s).

When I read HP in original, I realised that the “proper” translation is also extremely bad. I don’t know what I should do when/if I have children. Either I’ll start working on my own translation during the pregnancy, or I’ll teach them English from the birth.

>>paulry+(OP)
For instance, 'Longbottom' is translated quite literally, which can feel a bit silly.

>>royal_+Ba
It's silly in English too. Perhaps some British readers might be familiar with the name and its history/origins, but for most English readers, I suspect, it just sounds a bit silly, like he has a very tall butt.

>>royal_+Ba
As someone with an English "bottom" as in bottom-lands surname, I appreciate the deliberate silliness of "Longbottom" while leaning into a very traditional British sounding name.

>>royal_+Ba
Longbottom is the serious version, before that it was Stretcharse.

>>Increa+se
Washington, D.C. has the famous Foggy Bottom.

Edit: America has a lot of bottoms, apparently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_geographical_bottoms

Nowhere as grand as Aunt Mary's Bottom but South Dakota does have a Big Bottom.

>>untech+K3
We did the English route without even thinking about it. LOtR is very strange in Swedish...

>>untech+K3
The situation in Lord of the Rings has an added twist: many of the names are Old English, Anglo-Saxon or even Goth, and the translator faces a choice between leaving them alone and trying to translate them into Old Czech (Old Slavonic...), Old Finnish or whatever, which will nevertheless change the cultural context.

>>inglor+kR1
...and the twist on top of that is that JRRT has already translated the characters' actual names into anglophone cultural equivalents, eg:

  Maura Labingi          Frodo Baggins
  Banazîr "Ban" Galpsi   Samwise "Sam" Gamgee

>>royal_+Ba
In French he's called "Londubat", which phonetically means "long FROM the bottom", which is arguably even worse than the English name.

>>rendal+7L1
"Talk about mud flaps My gal's got 'em."

>>untech+K3
I hear Star Wars is a pain to translate because of the meaningful names.

“Darth Vader” was sometimes translated as “Dark Father”, but that his role as Luke’s father too obvious - a role the initial translators didn’t know existed.

>>pyuser+Gq2
George Lucas wrote that twist for The Empire Strikes Back. The character was already named Darth Vader.

>>082349+h42
What an absolute chad.

>>Increa+se
It's silly, but it does feel like a real name. There are many such names in Britain.

>>untech+K3
>> LotR broke through the iron curtain only in 90s

Strange, because my understanding is that The Hobbit was well-accepted by soviet authorities.

>>sandwo+nF2
Probably because it was simpler and less prone to political interpretation (a dark lord sitting in the east of the continent with a ton of humanoids that work like slaves to wage a war to the rest of the world).

>>psideb+1F1
Does it refer to a large valley? (lots of fertile ground) Perhaps, it is a punny reference to him being a pure blood.