My favourite moment while reading Harry Potter in different languages (so far)
English

My favourite moment while reading Harry Potter in different languages (so far)

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reading
literature
language learning
fantasy

I love Harry Potter and I really wanted to get the illustrated versions of the books. As I was already owning these books both in English and German, I decided to buy the first book in Spanish and the second one in French and started reading the first one. I probably was reading at reading pain level, because I think I’m on a low intermediate level in Spanish. However, I’ve read the Harry Potter books several times before and therefore knew the story quite well. While reading I looked up several words I didn’t understand, but whenever I couldn’t figure out a whole sentence or phrase I compared it to the German version of the book (edition from around 2001). Then I came back to the Spanish sentence and was usually able to figure it out. However, both versions were translations of the original English version and it was pretty interesting for me to see how different the same ideas where expressed. But this caused some confusion as well and I want to share the passage which was most interesting to me with you.

Rather at the end of the book is described that Harry and his classmates take their exams. I puzzled over the sentence ‘El professor Flitwick los llamó uno a uno al aula, para ver si podían hacer que una piña bailara claqué encima del escritorio.’ and therefore I checked the German translation which was ‘Professor Flitwick rief sie nacheinander in sein Klassenzimmer und ließ sich zeigen, ob sie einen Ananas-Stepptanz auf seinem Schreibtisch hinlegen konnten.’. It means something like Professor Flitwick wanted to see if they could perform a dance called ‘pineapple tap-dance’ on his desk. When I came back to the Spanish sentence I was puzzled. The meaning of the Spanish sentence seemed rather to be that the pupils task was to make happen that a pineapple dances a tap-dance on the desk instead of dancing themselves. So I decided to check the original English version, where is written ‘Professor Flitwick called them one by one into his class to see if they could make a pineapple tap-dance across a desk’. I could see where the German version was coming from. But I resumed that the Spanish interpretation makes far more sense considering Professor Flitwick teaches charms and not dancing, which therefore means that every time I read the German book I got it wrong.

It was a special moment for me because it reminded me that it is always best to read the original version of a book if possible. But it also showed me that my Spanish must be on the right track, because otherwise I couldn’t have discovered the difference in meaning. Reading two translations side by side was quite interesting but nonetheless I decided to use the English version whenever I don’t understand the French sentence in book 2 from then on ;)

I’m looking forward to your comments and corrections, because I just started English studies at university. Since I left school in 2013 I’ve done a lot of reading, listening and watching in English, but I’m afraid my writing got kind of rusty. Therefore Journaly is a good opportunity for me to practice!

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