Now that I’ve FINALLY finished off the Trilingual Hobbit Reread, I’m going to do another one–and this time I’ll be doing Harry Potter! This has been inspired in no small part by the Harry Potter reread they’ve been doing on Tor.com, and how I never did actually get around to reading book 7. But before I read book 7, I need to reread 1-6. (Oh DARN whatever shall I do.)
Thanks to the ease with which I can get multiple language editions of the stories off of Pottermore, I have the English, French, and German editions of Book 1 of the series all in ebook form now. (I think it’s pretty neat, actually, that Pottermore sells ebook copies of the series in so many languages–they’ve got several others besides French and German, and I gotta say I’d be tempted by the Japanese if I had the first clue about how to read the characters!)
(However, important note of interest–Pottermore did NOT let me buy the UK English editions of the ebooks, even though it did let me get the French and German. The site has some sort of geoIP checking in place that saw I was in the US, and one presumes that Rowling’s publishers have territory agreements in place to dictate where the English editions are sold. Which is weird given that the ebooks aren’t being sold with DRM on them, but territory restrictions are NOT the same thing as DRM. So.)
And in the interests of seeing if I can whip through the posts faster, I’m going to change the format of them a bit. I’m going to include a general commentary section for overall reactions to the action, as I did with most of the latter Hobbit posts. But I’m going to prune down the language commentary and will keep it to a few general sections:
* The longest bit I’m able to read in both French and German, and a breakdown of what that bit means
* Five vocabulary words that leap out at me in both languages
* Anything that leaps out at me as unique to either translation, particularly in regards to character names or interesting handling of story events, and particularly if one edition handles it differently than the other
I have books 1-4 of the UK editions of the stories in print and will be using those as my English edition for purposes of this story–though I will be comparing them against the US editions to see where they differ, and because I want to see what the French and German editions key off of, too.
This’ll be fun, and I hope y’all will enjoy this as much as I will!
