The cover of Chinese edition of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (Photo/Courtesy of People's Literature Publishing House)
Along with the demise of Voldemort nine years ago, some fans sighed about the end of Harry Potter series and their childhood dreams. No one expected that the wizard's charm will be back again; though the craze was stirred by an advance stage production which debuted in London three months ago.
On Saturday, the simplified Chinese version of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child hit the shelves nationwide, marking the end of a three-month wait for Chinese fans.
Different from the previous seven novels, the eighth volume of Harry Potter series is presented in the form of a script co-created by J.K. Rowling, screenwriter Jack Throne and Broadway director John Tiffany.
"I can say this script is as good as previous books," Wang Ruiqin, one of the two editors of the translated works, said at the launch ceremony in Beijing on Saturday.
"I've been thinking about recommending different types of literary works to teenagers such as drama. Children's plays are still not widely available in our country," Wang said.
Based on the stage production with the same name debuted on July 30 in London, the new story features a next generation under a new prophet when Harry and his fellows reach their middle age.
Published by People's Literature Publishing House, the book became available for preorder in late September. So far, the first run of 300,000 copies has been all sold out, and more copies are currently being printed, the publisher said.
Since People's Literature Publishing House first imported the first three books of Harry Potter series in 2000, nearly 20 million copies of the simplified Chinese version have been sold so far.
According to a report by Xinhua in 2015, Harry Potter book series have topped the Chinese children's best-selling charts almost every year since the first issue.
Fans nowadays mainly are the grown-ups and the children. A large number of fans have grown up along with the 16-year-publishing period and some have reached their middle age. But what they didn't expect is the book series would continue to charm their next generation. Some experts think that the popularity of Harry Potter has grown into a cultural phenomenon in China.
Translating magic world
"I didn't expect (there will be a sequel) as well. I was told it's a script so started to look forward to it. I really love theatre stuff," translator Ma Ainong told the Global Times in an interview two days before the ceremony.
"Harry Potter plays an important role in my career so it's a delight for me to pick it up."
At the book launch ceremony, people who bought the new book could get a spells dictionary free, which was particularly favored by the kids.
Expelliarmus, Stupefy, Expecto Patronum, Avada Kedavra, and so on - many Harry fans wonder how the translators put these names into Chinese.
Also a key translator for Harry Potter series, Ma recalled that she did meet a huge challenge while translating the first book because the words related to magic couldn't be found in dictionary and forced her to use her imagination.
"To deal with them, we first followed the function of the spells and then the pronunciations," Ma said.
"Take Levicorpus as an example, we saw it can make people float in the air upside down. So we translated it as dao gua jin zhong (literally upside down like a clock pendulum)."
Mostly adopting the four-character-chunk, Ma's translation of spells has been discussed widely online and compared with the traditional Chinese version published in Taiwan. Some think her spells can help with the imagining of the scene but some prefer Taiwan's version since theirs seem easier to speak out loud.
Apart from spells translation, the difference in role names and magical nouns was also subject to debate.
Ma paid little attention to Taiwan's version except the first book. According to her, the Warner Bros. Entertainment (producer of Harry Porter films series) hoped they could have the same translation as the Taiwan version so that can reduce the workload when they export the film to China.
Thus some names such as "muggle" and "forbidden forest" were directly adopted.
"But some, like the translation of 'Voldemort' as 'Fo Di Mo,' has the right sound but the Chinese characters are somewhat inappropriate, like 'Fo' can also mean Buddha; so we decided to change it," Ma explained.
Since the different schedule of publishing, such referencing was not done for the translations of the following books.
New version
Looking back at the early works, Ma admitted that there are some places that need to be improved and some foreshadows of later developments need to be reconsidered.
Ma told the Global Times they are now preparing a modified Chinese version of the whole series, which started in the first half of this year.
Same as previous books, the production of the eighth book was finished in three months.
Different from nine years ago, with the increasing fame of J.K. Rowling, more paper work was needed to be done with the British side this time. Thus the publishing house hired two editors for the first time in the production process.
"We tend to strictly follow the English version, so directly made hardcover versions, which in fact needed longer time to produce," Zhai Can, Wang's co-editor, told the Global Times.
"The whole team has just been through a crazy period of overtime work," Zhai recalled.
