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4.More information
AbstractMuch has been written about the international phenomenon that the Harry Potter series has become and inevitably about the translations that contributed to its success. Eirlys E. Davis's comparative analysis of some of these translations in particular shows dissimilarities between the strategies adopted in different languages and presents individual translators' choices as inconsistent.This paper deals almost exclusively with the French translation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and reveals that, in the light of the ideological and cultural reality of the receiving corpus, patterns of translation techniques do appear. This paper looks at the transformative strategies and their effects in the target text, first focusing on the treatment of alien British values. Their transformation and disappearance indicate the need to produce a text morally suitable for its assumed readership: French youngsters. Indeed, it seems that the skopos of the target text – being read by French children – determined the translator's decisions not only to smooth down extreme British otherness but also to reinforce the fantasy of Harry Potter's world.Indeed, the French creates an utterly “other” world by strengthening its fantastic and magical aspects while undermining the sense of familiarity and credibility of the community portrayed. The shift from a child's perspective in the original to an adult's in the translation leads to numerous omissions of banal and realistic details, weakening the realness of the setting and the protagonists.I give textual and extra-textual examples of these transformative strategies which ultimately reduced Harry Potter à l'école des sorciers to a fairy tale and shaped the way it was perceived and received in France.
Keywords: Harry Potter, best-selling children's literature, culture, ideology, reception
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9.More information
The study of children's play activities has not only been historically trivialized, but numerous widely held misconceptions about kids, their play, folklore and popular culture continue to persist today despite evidence to the contrary. For example, some adults believe that mass media and popular culture has contributed to the decline of kids' traditional play activities, while others argue that traditional play objects are being replaced by “media culture artifacts”; however, the child-centred fan-play research I present in this paper reveals that popular culture encourages and activates children's traditional and creative competences, rather than destroy them. The Harry Potter “phenomenon”, as a contested site where youth struggle for visibility and power, serves as the case study for this paper. Based on ethnographic observation of several local events, surveys, and interviews with child and teenage fans of Harry Potter, I examine several emergent, participatory, fan-play activities (including costuming, role-playing, make-believe and spells) and discuss the many ways children manipulate, appropriate, adapt and combine popular culture and folklore, using both creativity and tradition as expression of their lives, identities and power struggles. I conclude by discussing the heart of contemporary children's culture and play – the conservative/creative nature of children, hybrid play forms and the activation of traditional and creative competencies in the face of popular culture influences.
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