I am very happy that you are here enjoying Potter of Babbling!

I imagine Baldur Babbling as the son of Bathsheda Babbling, Hogwarts’ Professor of Ancient Runes. Professor Bathsheda is a specialist of language, and her publications include Ancient Runes Made Easy, Advanced Rune Translation, Magical Hieroglyphs and Logograms, and A Spellman’s Syllabary.

I, of course, am not really Baldur Babbling. I began my journey into Harry Potter translation while a graduate student of language and literature. (My doctoral research was a case study on the translation of specialized discourse into a “low-resource language.”) Aware of the many challenges in translating such a novel, I started collecting translations of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to compare the various translation strategies used to recreate the Harry Potter world in a new language. Other collectors, like Potterglot, The Potter Collector, Carly at AllThePrettyBooks, and the folks at the Dialogue Alley podcast, had already set the stage of Potter translations as a unique phenomenon. I aim to take that a step further with Potter of Babble and delve into the text of the translations themselves. I hope it will inspire Harry Potter fans and linguists alike to bring their Harry Potter books off their shelves and take a deeper look inside!