"Ginny, Harry, Teddy, Family" ...now in Chinese!

[starfishstar]

Guys! Someone just asked to translate a story of mine for the first time. What a strange and awesome feeling – I've never been the source text for someone's translation before. (At least that I know of, of course.)

The original story is here.
The Chinese translation, by Zlion/苏笙潇 is now here.

(At least, it should be. I had some trouble with the first version of the link, and navigating in a different language isn't easy...)

Cool stuff. I definitely don't speak Chinese at all, at all, but Google Translate (in one of those cases where it is indeed a helpful tool) is enough at least to show me that, yup, it's the same story. I had a lot of fun, actually, plugging different bits of the Chinese version into the translation engine and figuring out what was what.

Turns out here's how you say Harry: 哈利 (Hā lì)
And Ginny: 金妮 (Jīn nī)
Ooh, and Andromeda: 安多米达 (Ān duōmǐ dá)

How cool!

Equally interesting to me is that Google Translate recognizes those sets of characters – which as far as I can tell are simply phonetic approximations of the characters' English names – not just as random sets of syllables, but in fact as "Harry," "Ginny," etc. Which I assume means someone bothered to program the Harry Potter characters' names into the translation engine??

Fascinating.

Comments

[stereolightning.livejournal.com]

That is so cool! :)

[starfishstar]

:-)

[shimotsuki.livejournal.com]

That's really cool!

Which I assume means someone bothered to program the Harry Potter characters' names into the translation engine??

Or else that there is Potterfandom discussion online in Chinese? I wonder to what extent Google Translate depends on humans to set it up, vs. how much it "learns" from crawling the web or otherwise crunching bilingual texts on its own.

[starfishstar]

Ooh, thank you, of course! I think I even knew that at some point – that Google Translate "learns" by trawling the web and comparing texts – but I'd forgotten. That makes way more sense. And yes, if you google for example "金妮" (the phonetic transliteration of Ginny's name), most of the hits you get are indeed about Ginny the Harry Potter character (fan sites, Wikipedia page, images of the actress who plays her in the movies, etc.)

[shimotsuki.livejournal.com]

That's interesting as a name for Ginny -- 金 is the ordinary word for 'gold'/'golden' in Japanese (and apparently also in modern Chinese), and I didn't know 妮, but apparently it's a character that means something like "girl" and is used in Chinese names.

[starfishstar]

Ooh! Fascinating. So there's something of a possibility, perhaps, that when transliterating these names, the meaning of the syllables was taken into account as well... Though it does seem like they're mostly random... The characters for the name Harry (哈利), for example, are also used for other Harrys (like the British prince), so they're not specific to this one character. The Chinese translation of Voldemort's name does seem to have the word for "magic" in it, but I'm guessing that's a coincidence... since similarly dissecting the word for Slytherin comes out in part to "special forest," which seems unlikely to be deliberate...

Anyway, I'll stop there (because I could go on with this endlessly!) but if anybody's interested, I just discovered that the Harry Potter Wiki has lists of how various HP names and terms are translated in various languages – something that's always fascinated me; which translators chose to transliterate the original names exactly? Which created words that change the sound, but preserve some of the meaning? (e.g., the French "Salazar Serpentard," meaning snake) – http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Harry_Potter_in_translation_series

Oh, gosh, translating the HP books must have been so much fun!!

[bets-wilcox.livejournal.com]

"So there's something of a possibility, perhaps, that when transliterating these names, the meaning of the syllables was taken into account as well"

That's exactly what happens, most of the time, when names are transliterated from English to Chinese. There are a lot of homonyms in Chinese, so translators usually try to pick the ones with the nicest/most appropriate meanings. For instance, for the sound "gin," I can think of gold(金), today (今), pan-fry (煎), and probably many more, so obviously they went for a nicer meaning. This happens for political figures and celebrities as well.

I had first read Harry Potter in French, and sometimes the meanings (like Serpentard) were much more obvious to me in French than in English!

[starfishstar]

Hi! I don't think I actually know who you are, but I appreciate your comment, so...thanks :-)

Fascinating! This makes me think even more that it could be a lot of fun to translate between a character-based and an alphabet-based language, and play around with those possibilities.

And in general, those translators' choices – between transliterating the sound of a name or creating a new name that doesn't sound the same but instead keeps something of the meaning – intrigue me to no end. (For example, the Russian translations of Harry Potter do the former, but the French translations do the latter.) There's certainly an argument to be made for both, because one preserves form and the other content, and you can't always have both...

[bets-wilcox.livejournal.com]

Hi! I'm sorry, I should've introduced myself before this.

I've been reading your fanfics avidly since Christmas -- I think I found them on the R/T challenge, but I'm new to livejournal/ao3 and didn't have a login to comment. Anyways, I've been refreshing your blog every so often to see if there's a new story :), and slowly making my way through your RECs list.

[starfishstar]

Ooh, gosh, how cool! Well, thanks for now "delurking" (as they say), because I'm thrilled to hear that you've enjoyed my stories – and in fact also the recs, because I never really expected anyone to read or bother with those, so it's exciting for me to hear that someone's getting something out of them :-)

(And - btw, new story coming very soon!)

[bets-wilcox.livejournal.com]

yay! can't wait. :)

[solochan.livejournal.com]

That is sooo weird...I cant imagine someone translating my work! Like....weeeeird.

But awesome. :D

[starfishstar]

I know, right, awesome and strange? And it would be one thing if it were a European language that I could more or less follow along with, but Chinese is just so completely other for me!

[huldrejenta.livejournal.com]

That is so cool!
Such a wonderful compliment that someone wants to translate your work :D
Fascinating the way they transcribe the names. I especially like Andromeda in Chinese version :)

[starfishstar]

I know, I was very flattered to be asked! And as you can see, I'm now clearly having a ball thinking about Harry Potter names in Chinese transliteration :-)

I just learned Teddy as well: 泰迪 (Tài dí). Endless fun!