Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets Analysis

INRODUCTION

I have chosen to work on Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K Rowling for several reasons. Primarily, the book provides a various number of interesting challenges for the translator. Also, it contains several cultural markers; its text is abundant of references from other popular books for children. For instance, we can notice innumerable aspects from mystery and adventure series written by Enid Blyton within the world of Harry. The writer also uses her acquaintances of French and Latin in her origination of names and ideas that appertain to her fantasy universe.

In addition, this second novel of the Harry Potter series is an exceptional case. To put it differently, it spread globally in English and

Her remark is quite logical and makes me think about what seems an apparent question: Why did Jean-François Ménard feel that names have to be translated in “anglicized” French and not just leave the names in English? Is it because he was concerned with how the book would be received or it is simply due to the national translational norm of translating the text into French as much as possible? I will look at more examples with the next parts of my essay.

From this testimony, we can see the motivation and certain strategies that may originate from the translator’s desire to make the reading experience easier. In Ménard’s case, his desire was to communicate a sense of other to the reader in the target text culture but nevertheless resulted in a domesticated version of the source text.

2. The Translation of Names

Joanne Rowling’s choice of names provides several challenges to the translators since they are skillfully semantically loaded and also there is a play on words. In the table below I have chosen two names as an example in the fourth and fifth chapters of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and then, I have contrasted and analyzed their translation or their non-translation in French.

2.1. Translated Names

English

Slang and Non-Standard Language in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

The book is full of slang and non-standard English language from the exchanges between the child protagonists to the sophisticated language of certain characters. Samples of these are taken from the fourth and fifth chapters with their French translation and the table below shows how the tone of the text and the ‘Britishness’ are lost.

English text Function French translation

HARRY! What d’yeh think yer doin’ down there (page 35) spoken by Hagrid In order to emphasize the fact that Hagrid has a working class-dialect and speaks in a grammatical way which is incorrect at times HARRY ! Qu’est-ce que tu fiches ici? (page 89)

Dunno (page 44) spoken by Ron In order to mark the informal speech typical of children J’en sais rien (page 110)

I should ruddy well think not (page 37) spoken by Hagrid To mark an informal speech and swearing- indirect way to say bloody J’espère bien, il ne manquerait plus que ça (page 92)

Brilliant (page 55) spoken by Lee Jordan Contemporary exclamation typical of young persons Excellent (page