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by Danya [➚] · Monday, September 3rd, 2007

I know we’re living in a post-Harry Potter era, but I thought that this article on translating the Hogwarts tales into Hebrew was kinda cute, and it raises all sorts of interesting questions about translation in a bigger way, so I’m posting it.

The World Jewish Digest spoke with Gili Bar-Hillel, the series’ Hebrew translator, about the various challanges she encountered in trying to translate the thing:

Beyond the lack of British cultural parallels, which can be true anywhere outside of England, for Bar-Hillel there is also the issue of Israelis’ relative ignorance of Christianity, references to which play a small role in the series. A line that posed a special challenge appears in Book Five, where Sirius Black, Harry’s godfather, passes Harry’s door singing “God Rest You, Merrye Hippogriffs” toward his pet hippogriff, Buckbeak. Knowing that Israeli kids would not typically recognize Sirius’ melodic outburst as a parody of a Christmas carol, Bar-Hillel rendered it as a play on a Chanukah tune: Mi yimallel Hippogriff she-ochel, (“who will recount the story of the eating Hippogriff ”), a play on the popular Chanukah song that begins mi yimallel gvurot yisrael (“who will recount the heroic acts of Israel”)…

If Bar-Hillel has so many different considerations to account for when translating actual English into Hebrew, imagine the challenge she faces when rendering those words that Rowling made up, such as Polyjuice Potion (shikui polymitzi, according to Bar-Hillel), dementors (soharsanim) and animagus (animagus).

“Take the word ‘mudblood,’” says Suel. “You have many choices of what to do with that. On one extreme is to transliterate it, to write out the sound ‘mudblood’ in Hebrew writing. You could translate mud and translate blood, and then turn them around to put them into Hebrew syntax. Or you could make up something new which keeps the feeling of the word. [Bar-Hillel] translated it as botzdamim, mud-bloods. The plural form somewhat removes the problem of having to say whether the subject is male or female, though when Hermione is called a mudblood, Bar-Hillel uses botzdamit, the feminine form.

Full Story.