Having moved to Britain he swept Eliza Smith off her feet, marrying her in 1900 and settling in London. There doesn’t seem to be an explanation for Mornilles, and Gallions marks only a change in spelling from the original Galleons. Beginning in 2017 with the Bloomsbury UK House Editions, Harry Potter translation publishers the world over began creating their own anniversary editions - sometimes using the Bloomsbury cover art (as French did) or having their own unique covers (like Thai for example). The change was key, because in the third book Riddle explains that if you shuffle the letters of Tom Marvolo Riddle, you get “I am Lord Voldemort. Alexandre Desplat, who composed the soundtrack for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, is a French composer.

I suppopse that the similarities (special words are kept: Quidditsch, Hogwarts…, or literally translated: leaky cauldron = tropfender Kessel) in German edition are more due to the translaters intention to stay as close to the original as possible, while others involve more specifics of their own language. So there we are – a small guide to Harry Potter in French, there are a lot more differences but those are the ones that stand out to me the most. While the 1st prints look a lot like the other pre-movie font books, there are few things to help identify it. In the world of wizards, they aren’t paying for their wands and brooms in pounds or euros, but in bronze Knuts, silver Sickles, and golden Galleons, or Noises de bronze, Mornilles d’argent, and Gallions d’or. As Pickles points out in his article on this topic, often Rowling’s subtlety is lost in translation.It’s difficult with such twisting, complex plots, he said: "days are very long and busy when Harry is there”. The series went on to break all records and laid the foundations for a successful multimedia franchise, including eight extraordinarily popular feature films.

I really enjoyed reading Harry Potter in French, so maybe I’ll take on the Spanish or Italian version next! To prove it, here’s a list of some of the funniest and most interesting French translations of Harry Potter vocabulary. It’s funny that you happened to mention Finnish, I actually used to live in Finland and the sheer length of Finnish words always amazes me! So let's look at some of the names, places and events in the books and learn a little French along the way. Flying on broomsticks, casting spells, becoming a Quidditch champion (a kind of football for wizards), fighting trolls: Harry Potter proves to be a truly gifted wizard.There are, of course, many other cool and interesting translations in the French translation of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone – from the translation of Dudley Dursley’s nickname Dudleykins to Dudlinouchet in French or the Hogwarts Houses, my favorite of which is Poufsouffle.

As an English speaker, it is rather amusing to imagine the denizens of the wizarding world waving around their loaves of bread, but it is simply a good translation that makes perfect sense in the French language.The Breton translation of book 1 was first published in 2012 by An Amzer and translated by Mark Kerrain. She suggests that the translator was trying to make the concepts of prefects seem like it was a strange and fantastic idea that could only be found in the wizarding world. Equally, as Pickles points out, many of the other baddies names – think Malfoy and Lestrange – are French or at the least Anglo-Norman.

Similarly, Slytherin’s fairly subtle association with snakes is explicit in the French ‘Serpentard’.Some last names have been changed, though (looking at you, Neville Longbottom… er, Neville Londubat). Slytherin was changed to Serpentard which contains the word serpent, or snake, which is also similar. The heroism and sacrifice of her grandfather, for friends and liberty, is one that isn’t a stranger to her fictional son. And finally, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was turned into Harry Potter et les Reliques de la Mort. E (in English it stands for Universal Elementary Sorcery Certificate) and the word ‘buse’ is the French word for a buzzard, a North American bird.