A FRIEND OF A FRIEND, the first friend told me, was doing her doctorate and the subject of her thesis was the difficulty of translating the Harry Potter novels into different languages.
Which sounds absurd, until you think about it. The name ‘Harry Potter’ might be understandable in French, and German, and Cantonese, but would the audible disjuncture between ‘Dumbledore’ and ‘Snape’ be as clear in an Italian accent? How could the puns in ‘Diagon Alley’ or ‘Pensieve’ be made to work? And what sense would ‘Hogwarts’ make without knowledge of either hogs or warts?
In Goscinny and Urderzo’s comic series, pun-based names ‘Asterix’ and ‘Obelix’ may have lost their accents, but the jokes are as effective in English as in French. Some of the names are definitely improved in the translations: ‘Panoramix’ makes no sense as the name for a potion-brewing Druid, but the translation ‘Getafix’ does; ‘Idefix’ (a pun on idée fixe) isn’t as good a name for a dog as ‘Dogmatix’. ‘Assurancetourix’ – a pun on the French for ‘comprehensive insurance’ – is a bizarre name for a bard, and the translated ‘Cacofanix’ is a definite improvement.
Translators often improve the names of their characters. When Hergé wrote Tintin, he had the foresight to give ‘Captain Haddock’ an English name to start with. ‘Professeur Tournesol’ is an odd name for a scientist (tournesol is the French for sunflower), where ‘Professor Calculus’ is more fitting. Translated names aren’t always appropriate: when the ‘Château de Moulinsart’ turns into ‘Marlinspike Hall’, it’s a more fitting residence for Captain Haddock – but in the illustrations it’s clearly a French chateau. And how ‘Dupont and Dupont’ turned into ‘Thomson and Thompson’ is anyone’s guess.
