I’m reading HP4 in Japanese right now and I came across this awesome coincidence with homophones in English/Japanese.
It’s from the scene where Winky the house elf is found with Harry’s wand shortly after the Dark Mark has been conjured in the forest near the Quidditch World Cup stadium. The English (original) version goes like this:
“If you accuse my elf, you accuse me, Diggory!” shouted Mr.
Crouch. “Where else would she have learned to conjure it?”
“She — she might’ve **picked it up** anywhere —”
“Precisely, Amos,” said Mr. Weasley. *“She might have* ***picked it up***
*anywhere. . . .* Winky?” he said kindly, turning to the elf, but she
flinched as though he too was shouting at her. “Where exactly did
you find Harry’s wand?”
Now, the “word play” here is that the first “picked it up” has the meaning of “learning something” while the second one is the literal meaning of physically picking an object up.
In the Japanese version, two different words were used – 修得 in the first instance (to learn) and 拾得 (to pick up) in the second one, both with the reading しゅうとく. The second verb is accompanied by those emphasizing dots, not sure what they’re called.
I just thought that was really cool and hope some of you might appreciate it as well 🙂
2 comments
Cool find! I’m sure the translators were proud too lol. Finding something like this makes me very happy to be bilingual
Good find! Here’s something in the same vein. In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, two sea creatures explain how their underwater school works.
* Alice: “How many hours a day did you do lessons?”
* Mock Turtle: “Ten hours the first day, nine the next, and so on.”
* Alice: “What a curious plan!”
* Gryphon: “**That’s the reason they’re called lessons, because they lessen from day to day.**”
Here are three different translation attempts from various publishers:
1. 毎日、時間が減ずるから、時減^({じげん})というわけだ。
2. 一日一日少なくなっていくから、少学校^({しょうがっこう})と言うんだよ。
3. 一日一日と軽くなっていくから、軽古^({けいこ})っていうんだよ。
I like the first one best because both 時限 (school periods) and 時減 are valid words (時減 in 介護 context means the duration of care service is truncated), but only 小学校 (primary school) and 稽古 (studying) are real words in 2 and 3.