#i also think longdubat for longbottom isn't as good a longbottom

[pebblysand]

Hi!!

So I know you are french, and I have a (fun?maybe?) question. I don't know how old you were when you first read the hp books, but I was 12 and I read them in spanish, and a while ago we were watching this video with my mother about translating hp (she's a translator, it's our way to, you know, bond) and all the differences between the different languages, and one of the difficulties translating these books is that all the names have meanings, apparently👀 . So I thought "hey the spanish translation has all the original names!" And then I remebered CANUTO. You know who Canuto is? Padfoot. Yup. And canuto, where I live is like, slang? So my question is, are there names or charachters in french that when you think about them in your 30s 🤠 you think whaaaaaat?

I also remebered that Wednesday Adams is called Merlina, lol.

Anyway, I hope you had a fannnnntastic beginning of the year!!!

awwww thank you! hope you have a lovely beginning of the year too!

that is such a good question haha! for the record, i do want to say (this may be controversial) that for the most part, i think the french translator did an amazing job at 'translating' the names in HP. translating anything is such a difficult job (i, for one, am absolutely terrible at it) and doing it the right way for children's books that were so popular must have been so much pressure (especially in the later years). i know they get a lot of flack for doing it (a lot of people are always like "oh, you shouldn't have changed anything, etc.") but i think people need to remember that at the core, these are children's books where some of the characters are named Werewolf McWerewolf so foreign kids would of course need this context. especially since in the 90s/00s when the books were coming out, a lot fewer people spoke english (at least in france) than now. a lot of HP already inevitably gets lost in cultural translation (it took me a really long time, for instance, to understand how much HP touches on the UK's concept of social class and status), so i think anything you can do to mitigate other losses is very valuable.

having said that, the fact that tom riddle's middle name in french is ELVIS has scarred me for life and I JUST CANNOT. Elvis???????? Tom Elvis Jedusor?????

Jedusor (last name) is great because it's like being called Twistoffate which works really well for voldemort, but elvis kills me. and, i know why they did it, because in order for the CoS "reveal" to work you need different letters in each language. tom marvolo riddle makes "i am lord voldemort" and tom elvis jedusor makes "je suis voldemort" (i am voldemort), but COME ON.

ELVIS? 😅