Methodology

Rowlingisms

We decided that in order to compare translations of Rowlingisms across the three languages and draw analysis from any differences or similarities, it would be easiest to assemble a table that lists the Rowlingism in English first and then in French, Russian and Swedish. Additionally we were looking to use a technology known as XSLT, a program the can create the kind of HTML table we were looking for without hard-coding each value. However, we ran into an issue because when using XSLT, it would only pull the first instance of a Rowlingism being tagged. While this is fine for some Rowlingisms such as “History of Magic,” this became problematic for characters especially those who are often referred to by first name only, first and last name, Mr./Mrs. (last name), only last name or even by something else entirely (examples: Voldemort/You-Know-Who, Harry Potter/The Boy Who Lived). We decided that for the purpose of clarity we would refer to the character or Rowlingism in it’s full, most basic form, i.e. in the chart Harry would be Harry Potter and each cell would show the translation of "Harry Potter" instead of just Harry. For instances such as Voldemort also being known as “You-Know-Who,” that was given a separate row directly beneath the original entry for Voldemort.

After assembling the chart, we began thinking of a systematic way to analyze the translation differences across the three languages. We came up with three categories that all differences fell under: phonological, morphological and semantic differences. In order to represent this in a neat fashion, we decided that for Rowlingism translations that exhibited phonological difference, the cell would be highlighted red, for Rowlingism translations that exhibited morphological differences, the cell would be highlighted yellow, and for Rowlingism translations that exhibited semantic differences, the cell would be highlighted blue. After completing our table with highlighted cells, we were able to draw more analysis and come to further conclusions about variations in the translating of Rowlingisms.