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!
This was well written! Only some minor changes about word choice and form. It does sound fun to try and puzzle out book passages using two different translations of a text!
I too, use this practice method; I have a German version and an English version of both J.R.R Tolkien's The Hobbit and a book called Hatchet, which were my first two books I read this way. I find it a very fun way to practice reading! You bring up really great points about how differently certain ideas can be expressed across languages. Very good!
What a wonderful example on how translations can go awry. Great story. I have always heard that the two German translations - not sure which one you were using - were both done rather poorly, and this certainly would be a good example to prove that point. For some reason, the German language has the tendency to overuse the word 'machen'. In German, we 'make homework', we 'make pictures', we 'make a soup'....and so on. It's quite boring actually. But when the English language finally comes around to using the word 'to make' in the expression 'to make somebody do something', you can definitely not translate it with 'machen'. Go figure. By the way, I love Harry Potter too, and it would be fun to chat a bit about those books in posts to come. Maybe one day, in a later version, we can group together posts based on sub-topic, because generic topics like 'literature' might be a bit broad to find all of them, once there are thousands of people on this system. I very much enjoyed reading your post. Thank you
Very interesting! I would not have thought that the German translation is that bad. I currently read (or rather fight through) the first Harry Potter book in Persian. And I already noticed that the Persian translation is quite poor, also. It misses a lot of details and nuances. But it's probably good for me as a beginner in the language, haha :D I also compare it with the original English text.
I also love Harry Potter ant totally agree with Carol. We should keep chatting about the differences in translations or just why we love the book and group them together. At the beginning of the year I also read the fist book in French and I wonder how is your reading process going. If you didn't start yet I will give you a spoiler. There is an awesome audiobook version from Bernard Giraudeau, a brilliant french actor. You will love it!
This is really interesting. I have read the whole series several times, but in English only, although German is my native language. I have started to read the first book in Spanish and I am looking forward to reading the French, Italian and Dutch versions as well. Good idea to compare different translations.
Yes, I have the first book in Spanish, English and Esperanto. Should be interesting to see how they differ.
This difference between translations (especially with Harry Potter) is the reason why I usually collect series in one language only. I thought about doing a similar idea that you talked about in your post where I would buy the first book in French, second in Portuguese, third in German, etc, but I realized that the translation differences would bother me. However, I think I will collect my favourite book in the series to compare the differences, because I love analyzing the art behind translation.
Hello, thank you very much for your helpful corrections and explanations and for sharing your thoughts! This was my first entry on Journaly and now I'm very happy and motivated to write more :) I wasn't aware that the German translations are known to be rather bad, so this is good to know. For me, comparing two versions is actually a lot of fun and worked out pretty well so far. I've just started to read the French version of book two and already wondered about the fact that they translated 'Hogwarts'. I've never recognized this word as a compound of 'hog' and 'wart', but in the French one it became 'Poudlard', which seems to be a combination of 'bacon' and 'lice' somehow and is therefore kind of related to 'Hogwarts'. Thanks for recommending the audiobook, I will look into it. This would be a good way to improve my listening as well.