geri_chan | Miscellaneous bits of HP trivia

1) You know you're a Harry Potter geek when...you spot a motorcycle with the license plate "GRFNDR" and think, "Ah, that must stand for 'Gryffindor'--the owner must be a Harry Potter fan!" I wasn't able to hang around till the owner came to back to confirm that, though--and I didn't want to seem like a stalker/nutcase in case it stood for something else. But it made me grin, imagining that it might be Sirius's flying motorcycle! ^_^

2) I was browsing the Young Adult collection at my local library, and a book called "The Secrets of My Surburban Life" by Lauren Baratz-Logsted caught my eye, due to the summary on the back cover: "Everything changed for Lauren ('Ren') after Harry Potter killed her mom." How's that for a teaser?! So of course I had to skim the beginning of the book to find out what was going on. It seems that Ren's mom was a writer, and was planning to kill off the novelist character in her latest book by having the author be crushed to death by a truckload of her own books. So Mom, being a stickler for research, had to stage the accident to see if it would really work--and it worked a little too well, crushing Mom under a pile of Harry Potter books. This excerpt from the book is hilarious: "The coroner said that if it had been one of the earlier Harry Potter books, the thinner ones, she might've survivied. But as it was, it was one of the later fat ones, and a thousand of those babies, crashing down on Mom's pretty head, was enough to take her away from me for good."

At least, I thought it was funny, but maybe I have a twisted sense of humor. ^_^ Is it sick of me to giggle while picturing this poor woman being crushed under a stack of copies of "Goblet of Fire," or worse, "Order of the Phoenix"? I haven't finished the book yet, but the HP plot device and the tongue-in-cheek tone were enough to get me to borrow the book and take it home. It sounds like it will be a fun read.

3) The library also has some of the Japanese editions of the HP books, and I was interested to see how the translator handled certain things, like the use of honorifics (san, kun, chan, etc.). The Japanese editions also come with a nifty little newsletter supplement called "Owlpost" that has stuff like lists of characters or places or spells, and sometimes commentary from the translator.

I really suck at reading kanji, but since this is a translation of a Western book, there's lots of katakana, which makes it easier to indentify the characters' names. (For non-Japanese speakers, katakana is a phonetic alphabet, used mainly for words borrowed from other languages, and much easier to read than the picture-based kanji characters.) And I assume because it's a children's series, there are lots of furigana, or pronunciation guides, which makes it easier to read the kanji.

I took home Book 2, and compared certain passages between the Japanese and American editions, and made a few interesting observations. Harry refers to Mr. and Mrs. Weasley as "Weasley-obasan" ("Auntie Weasley") and "Weasley-ojisan" ("Uncle Weasley"). Sometimes Harry just calls Mrs. Weasley "obasan," dropping the "Weasley," and I assume he probably does the same with Mr. Weasley. (I'm loosely translating the terms as "aunt" or "uncle," but a blood relation isn't necessarily implied. It's how a child would address a middle-aged man or woman that he's familiar with, say, a neighbor or a friend of the family.)

I was curious to see how the kids would address each other--would Ron and Harry call Hermione, "Hermione-chan" or just "Hermione"? Would Hermione call the boys "Ron-kun" and "Harry-kun"? I only skimmed a few chapters, but it seems like the translator chose to keep to the style of the original novels and not have the students use honorifics with each other. This is natural for the trio, since they are close friends, but even Colin addresses Harry as plain "Harry," not "Harry-sempai," as a younger student would normally address an older student in Japanese. Likewise, Harry addresses Oliver Wood as just "Oliver," not "sempai," or even "Captain" (I think that would be "bucho"), since Oliver is his team captain.

"Professor" is translated as "sensei" ("teacher"), which is pretty much as I expected. So Snape is "Snape-sensei," or using the Japanese pronuncation, "Suneipu-sensei". In Japanese, syllables always end in vowels, with the exception of "n," which is why there are the extra "u" sounds in "Snape". ("Sempai" technically falls under this rule, since it's actually spelled "senpai" but pronounced "sempai," in case you were wondering.) Now, if Sirius knew about this, I bet he'd take great pleasure in twisting the pronuciation into "Snapey-poo"! (And I wouldn't blame Snape at all if he hexed Sirius into oblivion! ^_^)