So, I've been planning for a while now to buy Harry Potter books in Dutch when I got here. I opened one up at the bookshop and found that they had changed all the names. Harry was still Harry, but the Dursleys had become the Dufflers, and Mr. Dursley's first name was now Otto, and Malfoy was something like Malicious. And Hogwart's wasn't Hogwarts! I can't remember what it was called, because I slammed the book shut in exasperation.
Was it necessary to change the names? Did they all mean something really obscene in Dutch? Would leaving the names make the Dutch children feel that they were alone in an Anglophone world?
**So, I brought this up with a Dutch friend, and he said, "But you had to translate it so that the names gave the same impression that they do in English, because of the sounds. So Dumbledore, you know, had to be something that had the same sound-impression as Dumbledore does in English." Here's the thing, though: English and Dutch are on the same branch of languages, and the contain pretty much the same sounds, barring the throat-clearing G that they have here. So how does the sound of Dumbledore, or Hogwart's, not translate? I think this is one of those mysteries that only native speakers can truly understand.**
No comments:
Post a Comment