The new Harry Potter Italian translations are literal trash, and apart from some adjustments about evident mistakes that needed to be emended, it just comes off as a deliberate effort to make it sound more foreign and unfamiliar.
Do tell more, please! (…and is it even worse than the ASOIAF translations by Altieri?)
I find it very sad that most puns in names are now completely alien to the Italian reader. It’s nearly impossible for the average Italian reader to catch all the puns and hints hidden in people’s names, more so if the reader is a kid.
Some translators forget that their job consists in transferring meaning, not in transposing word for word from one language to another. And when a text has hidden meanings in names that are relevant to the story, you need to find a viable way to somehow render them or else it’ll lose valuable information.
The following changes appear in the 2011 editions onwards and were released by editor Luigi Spagnol for the Salani publishing house. Essentially, these changes replace most of the Italianised surnames with their English equivalent.
- Argus Gazza > Argus Filch - “To filch” is an informal verb meaning “to steal”. The Italian word gazza is a clear reference to the gazza ladra “magpie” (or more literally “thieving magpie”), because this bird is known for collecting or stealing shiny objects from humans.
- Gilderoy Allock > Gilderoy Lockhart - Lockhart is surname of Scottish origin which means “brave” or “hardy”. Professor Lockhart is known for being a good-looking but cowardly man, so his surname choice is pretty much ironical. The Italian Allock, apart from retaining the some similarities in sound to “Lockhart”, is a clear nudge at the word allocco, which means “stupid and clumsy person”.
- Horace Lumacorno > Horace Slughorn - The Italian words for “slug” and “horn” are lumaca and corno, so it makes sense to render that as Lumacorno.
- Lumaclub > Slugclub - see above.
- Fiorenzo > Firenze - This one change is incomprehensible to me. The English name of the Tuscan Italian city is Florence, so having a centaur called Firenze isn’t that strange. But the Italian name of Florence is Firenze, so the translator thought it would be better to call him Fiorenzo instead. Fiorenzo is an actual Italian male name related to Firenze.
- Sibilla Cooman > Sybil Trelawney - Professor Trelaney is a seer or prophetess. She’s the witch who prophesied Voldemort’s demise at the hands of a boy to be born in July. In Roman and Greek mythology, a sibyl is a priestess and a prophetess. One of the most famous prophetesses in the ancient world lived in the Greek city of Cumae, in Southern Italy, near Naples. In Italian, this sibyl is often referred to as Sibilla cumana, so professor Sibilla Cooman is a reference to her.
- Madama > Madame - Madama is the Italian word for “madame”.
- Cornelius Caramell > Cornelius Fudge - “fudge” is a crumbly or chewy sweet made from sugar, butter, and milk or cream. Caramell is a pun on the Italian word caramella “candy” or caramello “caramel”. Either way, it perfectly recreates the pun of the original.
- Oliver Baston > Oliver Wood - Oliver was the Captain of the Gryffindor Quidditch team. Baston (with stress on the a) is a pun on bastone, which means “stick” or “cane”. The word “wood” probably refers to the fact that, as Captain and Keeper, Oliver spends a lot of his time on his broomstick.
- Folletto > goblin - The Italian word for “goblin” is folletto.
(via plurilinguismo)
