The translation into Maltese of 'Diagon Alley', the fifth chapter of J.K. Rowling's book, 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone'

Abstract

The purpose of this work is the translation of "Diagon Alley'', the fifth chapter from the novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling, from English to Maltese, and the analyses of the translated version of the new terminology that the author invented in English. Han-y Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is an intriguing novel, the first of a series of novels about a young sorcerer. Besides the fact that the story line is fabulous, it is mostly intriguing because of the amount of imagination it took J.K. Rowling to come up with it. Though it is a children's book, it was definitely not a walk in the park to translate, because after reading it, one realizes the amount of new words the author came up with for the world she created in her book. Thus it was quite hard to describe and translate them into Maltese. Besides that, the author even invented proper nouns, like names of characters, names of places and names of shops which were a challenge to translate. The method adopted for the translation of the chapter was the following: 1. The chapter was read in English. Any difficulties and new terms were highlighted. 2. Various Internet sites regarding the book were used in order to get to know more about the story and the author's culture. This shed some light as to how Rowling came up with certain terms and names, which then led me to the final decision as to how these words should be tackled in order to translate them into Maltese. 3. The same chapter was read in Italian, French and German to see how different cultures treated these new terms and how different translators tackled them. If one reads the book in Italian and French, for example, one realizes that some of the proper nouns were changed round to suit the language in question. The German translation kept a lot of the original words, since English is a Germanic language like German, so most of the words could easily be kept to suit the German public. Through this it was also possible to see to what degree other translators stayed faithful to the original text.