Potter of Babble

The Wizarding World of Harry Potter through the Magic of Muggle Languages!

Harry Potter in Asturian (and how Hagrid is unique in a language of 250,000 speakers)

The Asturian translation of Harry Potter is one of the rarest in the world. So what’s it like? And how is Hagrid’s accent translated?

Asturian Language: The Story of Bable and Its Features

Asturian is a small language in northern Spain with a gigantic history.

Printing error: Chamber of Secrets in Afrikaans

Today I was taking a look through Harry Potter en die Kamer van Geheimenisse (Afrikaans Chamber of Secrets, translated by Janie Oosthuysen). I happened across this printing error in Chapter 16. The page header says “Die Man met Twee Gesigte”… Continue Reading →

87 Translations of Harry Potter. What Languages Could Be Next?

Harry Potter has been translated into everything from Ancient Greek to Greenlandic to Māori. So what’s left?

Sherbet lemon revisited (Reader Mail)

A reader wrote in about Dumbledore’s favorite sweet turning into a drink. How does he “unstick” two lemonades? Also: how are “sherbet balls” translated?

[PB Bite] Low-resource languages: what they are and why they matter

Low-resource languages present a problem for translation and for education. But translation literature of world-building works like Harry Potter can help!

Diglossia and literacy: Arabic as example

Some communities around the world use two languages for different situations. So what happens when only one of those languages is used for reading and writing?

Some observations on Croatian Harry Potter: old vs new translations

Collectors got their 100th translation in late 2022! Here are some preliminary observations on how it compares with the previous Croatian translation.

[PB Bite] Dumbledore’s favorite: sherbet lemon, lemon sherbet, and lemon drops

Albus Dumbledore loves sherbet lemon so much that it’s the password to his office. But sherbet lemon is a candy specific to the UK. So when the story was brought to other countries—including the US—nobody knew what to call it in the local language.

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