The popular series of books about the wizard boy Harry Potter has many readers and a huge number of different translations. Even a person who is not very familiar with this saga must have heard different opinions about the translations of these books. Which ones are considered the best?
Instructions
Step 1
Many literature lovers are of the opinion that no work has excellent translations. It is best to read books in the original, since no translator, no matter how wonderful and professional he is, can fully convey the idea and language of the author. And this opinion has the right to life, but still not everyone knows a foreign language well enough to enjoy reading as in their native language. Therefore, ordinary readers have to resort to the services of translators.
Step 2
The most famous work of the British writer J. K. Rowling, "Harry Potter", was translated by a huge number of people. These were fans who did not want to wait too long for books in Russian to be released, literary translators, official translators of the Rosmen publishing house, which had the rights to print books about the little wizard in Russia. The difficulty in translating this series of books was not only to perfectly translate the English text into Russian, but also to adequately reflect the very strange names of various magical creatures, objects, places and names.
Step 3
The official translation of the Rosman publishing house is considered to be quite good among those people for whom the books about Harry are just interesting reading, but nothing more. The good thing about the official translation is that it is convenient to offer it to children; it is arranged in books that are easy to find in stores or on the Internet. However, for people who sincerely love "Harry Potter" and even more so are familiar with the original text, the translation of "Rosman", to put it mildly, is not ideal. There are many mistakes in conveying the meaning of sentences, there are very strange phrases in structure, there are frank mistakes in translation. For professional translators who received a lot of money for their work, such a level of translation is frankly unacceptable.
Step 4
Maria Spivak's translation, which recently became a new official translation and was published in a book version by the Makhaon publishing house, also has its pluses and minuses. This is a fairly accurate translation in terms of language, it does not contain many of the errors inherent in the official translators of the Rosman publishing house, but it is also not perfect. At the beginning of the existence of this version of the translation, Maria Spivak simply made her own transposition of the Harry Potter books, without thinking about printing. Of course, in its version, it could allow some deviation from the original. It concerns, first of all, the names of heroes and the names of places, creatures and magical plants - her too authorial view of the English counterparts was criticized even by those readers who somehow do not like the official translation. In addition, Spivak does not have that atmosphere of a truly English fairy tale, the spirit of magic and grace of language, which is present in Rowling's work. Some readers call her language too mundane and rude.
Step 5
Several versions of the so-called "folk translation" were made by fans of this series of books. And the fans did their best for themselves, wanting to correct all the mistakes of literary translators. These translations were made by people who are truly in love with books. In terms of accuracy, such translations are much ahead of the published books of the publishing houses "Rosmen" and "Makhaon". The names of the heroes in them do not suffer and often do not even differ from the original ones. However, these translations were still done by people who are quite far from literature and book writing. Therefore, in places such versions of "Harry Potter" are very remotely reminiscent of a literary work.
Step 6
But the Ukrainian neighbors, it seems, were able to outstrip Russian translations on all counts. Even the British recognized the Ukrainian version of the book of the publishing house "A-ba-ba-ha-la-ma-ga" as the best translation of the Harry Potter books, the closest and at the same time literary able to reflect the essence of the work.
