Hogwarts is a joke. It is warthog with the halves swapped: an ancient castle named after a pig with a skin condition. Muggle leans on mug, British slang for someone easily fooled. Avada Kedavra is built to echo abracadabra, the one magic word every English-speaking child already knows. Snape sits close enough to snake to be suspicious and far enough away to stay deniable.
None of that survives a dictionary. Which is the problem the Harry Potter translations had to solve, in around eighty-five languages, on a deadline, and, once the series got big enough, without being allowed to read the book early.
What follows is ten of those solutions: a tour of Harry Potter in other languages that starts with the school itself. Each entry is a different kind of problem: a place name, a common noun, an invented sport, a magic system, an embedded riddle, a joke acronym, an anagram, a mirror that reads backwards, a character name, and a piece of history. Ten problems, ten languages. Almost every translated word quoted here was read out of the published text rather than a fan wiki; where no edition could be got hold of, the source is named at the end. If this list leaves you wanting to read one of these translations yourself, our guide to how to learn a language explains why a book you already love is one of the best tools for it.
The 10 Harry Potter translations at a glance
Harry Potter has been translated into around 85 languages. Because Rowling's invented words carry jokes rather than meanings, translators could not simply translate them. Each had to choose, word by word, between building a new joke and leaving the English where it stood. Here are ten who built.
| Language | English word | Becomes | Why it works |
|---|---|---|---|
| French | Hogwarts | Poudlard | "Bacon louse", from the translator's own account |
| Mandarin Chinese | Muggle | 麻瓜 máguā | "Numb melon"; now real Chinese slang |
| Yiddish | Quidditch | שיסבעזעם shisbezem | "Shoot-broom", compressed from a proverb |
| Finnish | Wingardium Leviosa | Siipiirdium lentiusa | An entire fake Latin, built from Finnish |
Jump to: French · Chinese · Yiddish · Finnish · Turkish · Spanish · Greek · Japanese · Russian · Polish · FAQ
1. French: Poudlard
Replaces: Hogwarts · Literally: "bacon louse" · Translator: Jean-François Ménard
Start with the school, because Hogwarts is the clearest illustration of what these translators were up against: a name that means nothing and suggests everything.
Rowling built it by inverting warthog. Jean-François Ménard, who translated all seven French volumes for Gallimard, worked that out and then had to decide what to do about it, in his own words:
"In English it's Hogwarts, and that's an inversion of warthog. A warthog is a phacochère, which literally means the pig that has warts. Hogwarts plays on that word. I said to myself, pig warts, that's not great. So I tried to get close to something not very appetising for the warts. I arrived at pou [louse], and the pig turned into lard [bacon fat]."
So: Poudlard. Same pig, new blemish, identical register. A grand institution named after something you would not want on your skin. Ménard adds a detail that tells you the coinage landed: French readers sometimes assumed Poudlard was the English word, and would ask him whether it should be Poudlard or Poudlarde.
His account of Moldu for Muggle is the same method applied to a common noun. Muggle has no fixed dictionary meaning, so he hunted for a French word of similar shape, starting with M, that suggested someone slightly soft in the head — mou du bulbe, "soft in the brain-stem". Not a translation of the word. A translation of the feeling of the word.
And once, he quietly improved on the original. Ravenclaw, he decided, came out in French as something like a raven's talon, and he did not care for the bird; the house's emblem is an eagle anyway. So Ravenclaw became Serdaigle, "eagle's talon": the talon kept, the wrong bird replaced. French readers get a house whose name matches its crest. English readers do not.
Hogwarts in different languages: the same three-way choice
Hogwarts is the cleanest test there is, because there are only three broad things you can do with it: remake the joke, leave it in English, or respell it.
| Language | Hogwarts becomes | Strategy |
|---|---|---|
| French | Poudlard | Keep the pig, drop the warts |
| Czech | Bradavice | Keep the warts, drop the pig: it is simply the Czech word for warts |
| Finnish | Tylypahka | Keep neither, keep the texture: tyly (curt, harsh) + pahka (a burl on a tree) |
| Dutch | Zweinstein | zwijn (swine) + steen (stone), with an audible echo of Einstein |
| Norwegian |
Translators have names for the first two of those. Domesticating means remaking the joke inside the target language; foreignising means leaving it in English and letting the reader cope. Respelling it in another script is the same choice with a haircut. Nobody sits at either pole for long, as the next nine entries keep demonstrating.
The Hungarian is the outlier, and arguably the smartest. Tóth Tamás Boldizsár has explained that he rejected translating Hogwarts literally — in Hungarian it just comes out as "warthog" — and started thinking instead about schools. Roxfort is what he arrived at: the letters of Oxford crossed with rokfort, Roquefort cheese. Rowling's name works by yoking grandeur to something faintly grotesque, and this gets to the same place by a completely different road.
Also in the French Harry Potter
- The Sorting Hat is the Choixpeau: choix (choice) welded into chapeau (hat). Where the English name only describes the hat, the French one is itself the joke.
- Snape is Rogue, which in French means haughty and disdainful. The snake is gone; the personality is louder.
- Ménard considered translating Dumbledore as professeur Bourdon — bourdon is the French bumblebee, which is exactly what "dumbledore" means in old Devon dialect — and rejected it. He also left Hagrid and Minerva alone. Domesticating translators were not maximalists on principle; they judged name by name.
- Oliver Wood became Dubois, and the fate of that name across the other translations is the single best map of the whole problem. When McGonagall asks Flitwick if she may "borrow Wood for a moment", Harry — being marched off in terror — wonders "was Wood a cane she was going to use on him?" In French she asks to borrow du bois, "some wood"; Dutch (Plank), Serbian (Drvce, a little stick), Yiddish (Holtz) and the original Italian (Baston, from bastone) rename him the same way, and all of them keep Harry's question too. Most translations leave the English surname alone, which leaves Harry's question doing work the name no longer does: Czech, Finnish, German, Swedish, Hungarian, Polish, Vietnamese, Japanese and Chinese all have Harry wonder whether Wood is some kind of stick — and some of them have to gloss the English word first. Swedish and Japanese spell it out — "Wood, det betyder ju trä?", "Wood, doesn't that mean wood?" Spanish and Galician keep only the dread, asking whether Wood is the man who administers beatings. The 2014 Italian revision joins them, having handed Baston back: Harry now wonders only what "his Wood" could possibly mean, and hopes it is not going badly. Turkish and Greek let the whole thing go.
- Ménard worked twelve-hour days on the later books, starting at 6am. "I was on Harry Potter twenty-four hours a day and I even dreamed about it at night. I saw the text of the book unrolling on a screen."
- French readers grew impatient enough during the wait for each translation that Order of the Phoenix became the first English-language book ever to top the French bestseller list.
2. Chinese: 麻瓜 máguā
Replaces: Muggle · Literally: "numb melon" · Translator: credited as 苏农 "Su Nong" — see below
This is the best-travelled pun in the Chinese Harry Potter, and one of the very few translated Potter coinages anywhere to have escaped the books entirely and entered ordinary speech.
Take it apart. 麻 má means numb, or pins-and-needles. 瓜 guā means melon or gourd, and by long-established slang extension, a head — it is the second half of 傻瓜 shǎguā, "fool", one of the most common mild insults in Chinese. So máguā is a numb-melon, a dull head, built on a template Chinese speakers already recognise for exactly this sort of dismissive contempt.
It also happens to sound roughly like "Muggle", and Rowling's own word nods at mug, British slang for a gullible idiot. Sound, sense and register, all three at once.
Then it kept going. 麻瓜 escaped the books. A 2018 Chinese explainer describes it as an internet buzzword: it turns up on forums and message boards, aimed at someone less skilled than everyone else. Which is not quite the mug Rowling started from: a máguā is the person who cannot do the thing, not the person who is easily fooled. The word left the books and drifted onto what Muggle actually denotes. Words crossing languages and coming back changed is not a Potter-only phenomenon either; Korean's Konglish vocabulary is built almost entirely out of it. The Chinese translation had to rebuild much more than this one word, and what it did to the spells is its own story.
Muggle in other languages
| Language | Muggle | What it suggests |
|---|---|---|
| English | Muggle | mug, British slang for someone easily fooled |
| Mandarin Chinese | 麻瓜 máguā | numb melon, i.e. a dull head |
| French | Moldu | "soft in the brain-stem", Ménard's own gloss |
| Czech | mudla | close to mudlat, to fumble or bungle |
| Finnish | jästi | invented, but shaped like a Finnish word for a blockhead |
Two of those glosses come from the translators themselves — Ménard explained Moldu, and Polkowski said in interview why his first attempt, tuman, was replaced by mugol. The rest are readings. The books never explain their own coinages, and neither did most of the people who made them.
The Serbian is worth pausing on. In a translation that otherwise just respells everything — Hari Poter, Snejp, Dambldor, Hogvorts — Normalac relocates the joke. English "Muggle" is wizard-world jargon: the contempt arrives wrapped in an invented word. Normalac is a word the reader already owns. Same contempt, borrowed from the playground. It sounds like what a teenager calls the boring people.
Also in the Chinese Harry Potter
- The Golden Snitch is 金色飞贼 jīnsè fēizéi, "golden flying thief". The Quaffle is 鬼飞球, "ghost-flying ball". Gringotts is 古灵阁, "ancient spirit pavilion". Parseltongue is 蛇佬腔, "snake-fellow accent".
- The translator of the first Simplified Chinese volume does not exist. Cao Suling (曹苏玲) began the translation and withdrew partway through; Ma Ainong (马爱农) finished it. Rather than credit two names, the credit went to 苏农 "Su Nong" — a blend of the two translators' names.
- Team translation is routine in Chinese publishing: two or three names on a volume to save time. What is unusual about 苏农 is that it does the reverse: it hides the collaboration instead of crediting it.
- Taiwan runs its own separate translation and disagrees on almost everything. Diagon Alley is 对角巷 "diagonal alley" on the mainland and 斜角巷 "oblique-angle alley" in Taipei; Knockturn Alley is 翻倒巷 "knock-over alley" versus 夜行巷 "nocturnal alley".
- The gap between the English and Chinese editions produced a whole genre of counterfeits. An unauthorised Chinese Deathly Hallows appeared three days after the English release. Alongside the pirate translations came home-grown imitations passed off as the real thing, with titles like Harry Potter and the Porcelain Doll and Harry Potter and the Big Funnel.
3. Yiddish: שיסבעזעם shisbezem
Replaces: Quidditch · Literally: "shoot-broom" · Translator: Arun Schaechter Viswanath
Arun Viswanath could have written kviditsh and moved on. Instead he reached for a proverb he first met as a teenager reading Itzik Manger's Khumesh-lider:
אַז גאָט װיל — שיסט אַ בעזעם az got vil — shist a bezem "If God wills it, a broom shoots."
He compressed the saying into a single word: shisbezem. A Yiddish reader meeting the name of the wizarding sport is standing inside a proverb about the impossible happening when heaven decides it should.
That is not a translation of "Quidditch", because Quidditch means next to nothing. It is a substitution: an empty English coinage swapped for a phrase the receiving culture was already carrying. If anything it is heavier than the original. Nowhere else in this list does a translator solve an invented word by reaching into his own literature and finding one waiting.
Quidditch in other languages
| Language | Quidditch | Built from |
|---|---|---|
| English | Quidditch | opaque; readers hear quiddity and ditch in it, Rowling said only Queerditch Marsh |
| Yiddish | shisbezem | "shoot-broom", compressed from the proverb above |
| Dutch | Zwerkbal | zwerk, a poetic word for the firmament, + bal: "sky-ball" |
| Finnish | huispaus | huis (something fast) + -paus from sieppaus, a snatch |
| Czech |
The boldest thing about the Yiddish edition, though, is not the vocabulary. It is the accents.
Rowling writes Hagrid in West Country dialect, which does specific social work: warm, rural, uneducated, outside the establishment. Viswanath, in his own words, "tried to transpose the wizarding world onto a map of the Yiddish-speaking world" as it was before the war — "without making the characters Jewish":
"Hagrid's dialect had to be Polish because the stereotype of the Galitzyaner is someone warm and boisterous with a sense of humor; that's obviously Hagrid. Hagrid is set up in contrast to others like McGonagall and Snape and Filch, so if he was going to be Galitzyaner, they had to be Litvish."
The distinction he is drawing is between register and identity: nobody in the Yiddish Hogwarts is said to be Jewish, but everybody sounds like somebody who is. Dumbledore is made to sound like a well-educated Torah scholar. Filch speaks in a thick Lithuanian Yiddish accent and cannot manage the sh sound, so he says sabes where he should say shabes. In the second book, Gilderoy Lockhart speaks heavy daytshmerish — the Germanising register that marks a Yiddish speaker as a pretentious social climber.
Also in the Yiddish Harry Potter
- Slytherin is Samderin. Viswanath's first instinct was to build something on shlang, "snake"; his wife vetoed it, and he now thinks she was right.
- The Golden Snitch is a goldene flaterl, a golden butterfly — butterflies being a stock image of the Yiddish folksongs he grew up with.
- Oliver Wood is Oliver Holtz; holtz is Yiddish for wood.
- Unlike the Hebrew translation, which played its Christian references down for an Israeli readership, Viswanath left every one of his intact. A language spoken for centuries alongside those customs already has words for all of them.
- The project started when his wife asked whether he wanted to raise children in a world with no Yiddish Harry Potter. He is the grandson of the Yiddish linguist Mordkhe Schaechter and the son of Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath, who co-edited the Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary.
- Published by Olniansky Tekst in Sweden in early 2020, it sold out in 48 hours.
4. Finnish: Siipiirdium lentiusa
Replaces: Wingardium Leviosa · Translator: Jaana Kapari-Jatta
Almost every translation leaves Rowling's spells alone, and there is a good structural reason for it: inside the fiction, the incantations are already a foreign language: foreign, but not opaque. An English child does not understand Expelliarmus, and still half-hears expel in it. Leave the word alone and both halves of that effect survive. Across the seventeen translations I read, Avada Kedavra survives word for word in Czech, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, Polish, Turkish and Vietnamese.
Finnish is the great exception, though not because it is the only language here without a Latin inheritance, since Hungarian, Turkish and Vietnamese have none either and kept the spells regardless, but because Kapari-Jatta was the only translator who counted the loss and decided to pay for it. And the loss is real. Where English took the Latin word, Finnish usually built its own: a telephone is a puhelin, a speaker; a computer is a tietokone, a knowledge-machine. There is no dense Latinate layer sitting under everyday Finnish for a spell to chime against. Expecto Patronum rings faintly against expect and patron for an English reader. That faint ring is the same effect that makes cognates such a shortcut for language learners. To a Finnish reader it is noise.
So Jaana Kapari-Jatta built a substitute: a mock-Latin assembled out of Finnish. Ordinary Finnish verbs and nouns, sliced up and mostly given Latinate endings, so that a Finnish child gets what an English child gets: a word that sounds like an incantation and still lets a root show through. Some of hers show more than Rowling's do.
Harry Potter spells in Finnish
| English spell | Finnish | Made from |
|---|---|---|
| Wingardium Leviosa | Siipiirdium lentiusa | siipi wing + lentää to fly |
| Expecto Patronum | Odotum suojelius | odottaa to await + suojella to protect |
| Expelliarmus | Karkotaseet | karkottaa to expel + aseet weapons |
| Riddikulus | Naurretavus | naurettava ridiculous |
| Protego | Varjelum | varjella to shield |
| Petrificus Totalus |
For the coinages distinctive enough to count cleanly, the Finnish and English tallies match almost one for one across all seven books: Odotum suojelius 38 times against Expecto Patronum 39, Karkotaseet 27 against Expelliarmus 27, Naurretavus 18 against Riddikulus 18. Which is how you know she never once let the English through. Every incantation, in every book, got its Finnish form — and got the same one each time.
But look at what the system leaves alone. Alohomora and Avada Kedavra both stay in Finnish, unchanged, and neither is Latin in origin. Avada Kedavra works by echoing abracadabra, the one magic word every child already has, which is why it travels intact into almost every language on this list. Neither was leaning on Latin recognition, so neither needed replacing. The rule is not airtight: Portus is Latin for a harbour and Anapneo is Greek for "I breathe", and both stand in the Finnish text exactly as Rowling wrote them. What Kapari-Jatta rebuilt was the working vocabulary — the spells children shout at each other. The furniture she left where it was.
Also in the Finnish Harry Potter
- Huispaus for Quidditch has Kapari's own explanation, her reading of the English rather than Rowling's and none the worse for it: "Qui is something fast, just like the first syllable of the Finnish huis. Ditch means diving for home base — it's about catching the Snitch by diving. So I took the ending paus from sieppaus [a snatch]." That is also why the Snitch in Finnish is the sieppi.
- Kalkaros for Snape comes from kalkkarokäärme, a rattlesnake.
- Tylypahka for Hogwarts is tyly (curt, harsh) plus pahka (a burl or knot on a tree). The pig let go, and the wart moved onto a tree.
- Orave for Quirrell hears the squirrel in the name (orava). Irveta for Gringotts is built on irvistää, to sneer. Kuhnusarvio is Slughorn; a Horcrux is a hirnyrkki.
- She described treating a new word like a strange animal you get acquainted with slowly. In her own words: "I look at what is around the word, what it has eaten and where it came from. I study what the word feels like and what it smells like."
- In 2008 she published a whole book about the process, Pollomuhku ja Posityyhtynen, answering questions Finnish readers had sent her.
5. Turkish: örümcek
Replaces: the answer to the sphinx's riddle · Literally: "spider" · Translators: Sevin Okyay & Kutlukhan Kutlu
Deep in the maze at the end of Goblet of Fire, a sphinx sets Harry a riddle assembled from English fragments: a person who lives in disguise (spy), the last letter of mend and the middle of middle (d), and the noise you make hunting for a word (er). Spy-d-er.
None of that survives translation. But the answer has to stay a spider, because two pages later a giant one attacks. So each translator had to build a new riddle that lands on their own word for spider, out of pieces a fourteen-year-old could plausibly find. Almost all of them did.
The Turkish builds its spider out of things you can hold, plus one piece of grammar. Örümcek comes apart like this:
| The sphinx says | Which gives |
|---|---|
| "You do what I say, so I may keep warm on a winter night, with two bones" | ör, from örmek, to knit. The "bones" are the needles |
| "Then the head of trusting-in-tomorrow. Or the end of what you wish to untie" | üm, from ümit, hope; and from düğüm, a knot |
| "The third is a suffix: not yesterday, not today — it will be tomorrow" | cek, the Turkish future-tense ending |
Knitting, hope, a knot, and the grammatical marker of the future, assembled into a spider.
And here is what makes it remarkable: the Turkish Harry Potter leaves the core invented vocabulary exactly as it found it. Hogwarts, Snape, Dumbledore, Gryffindor, Slytherin, Quidditch, Muggle, Bludger, Snitch, Quaffle — all untouched, right through the series.
What it does translate is the descriptive layer. Death Eaters become Ölüm Yiyen, which is exactly what it says. Dementors become Ruh Emici, "soul-sucker". The Sorting Hat is the Seçmen Şapka, "selector hat". Wormtail is Kılkuyruk, "bristle-tail". The line holds even at the edges: Buckbeak becomes Şahgaga, "shah-beak", and the Firebolt the Ateşoku, "fire-arrow" — both of them compounds of ordinary words in English too, and so part of the descriptive layer rather than the invented one.
Which is why the sphinx stands out. Everywhere else there is a description to translate or a name to leave alone. The riddle and the anagram offer neither: they force a translator who otherwise reaches for invention as little as possible to build a word the English does not contain.
Nine languages, nine completely different spiders
| Language | Word | Assembled from |
|---|---|---|
| English | spider | spy + d + er |
| Turkish | örümcek | ör (knit) + üm (hope, knot) + cek (future-tense suffix) |
| French | araignée | a (the first thing you learn) + règne (a king's reign) + ée (the end of année) |
| Spanish | araña | ara- (where Arabia begins) + -ña (where España ends) |
The Spanish answer lies where "the region of the sand mountains" begins and "the land of bulls, blood, sea and street festivals" ends: Ara-bia and Espa-ña.
The Hungarian does not assemble a word at all — it converges on one. Its three clues are a keresztes (a crusading knight, who travels in the sign of the Cross), a kaszás (the Reaper, because death's weapon is the scythe, kasza) and a madár (a bird — something whose feet never move that you still cannot catch). Harry says the three out loud and hears what they have in common: keresztespók is a cross spider, kaszáspók a harvestman, madárpók a tarantula. Strip the three modifiers and what is left is pók. Spider.
The Vietnamese translator rendered the English riddle literally and then had Harry grope towards the answer anyway — "gián điệp… gián… ơ… gián… nhện". The pieces do not add up to nhện, and the scene is reported rather than solved. It is the clearest measure of what the rebuilt riddles were buying everywhere else.
Also in the Turkish Harry Potter
- Most of the series was translated by Sevin Okyay, a well-known Turkish literary critic and cultural commentator, for much of it working alongside Kutlukhan Kutlu. Book one was done by the poet Ülkü Tamer.
- Voldemort's anagram is solved by throwing the spacing overboard: TOMMARVOLDO RİDDLE rearranges into ADIMLORD VOLDEMORT, "my name is Lord Voldemort", with the word-breaks landing wherever the letters allow and one dotted İ quietly becoming a dotless I.
- Turkish also leaves the Quidditch equipment in English. Where Chinese invents a "golden flying thief" and Finnish a sieppi, Turkish readers get Snitch, Quaffle and Bludger exactly as spelt in London.
- Sometimes the policy changes mid-series. A Horcrux is still a Horcrux throughout Half-Blood Prince, then becomes a Hortkuluk — built on hortlak, a revenant — for the whole of Deathly Hallows.
6. Spanish: P.E.D.D.O.
Plataforma Élfica de Defensa de los Derechos ObrerosReplaces: S.P.E.W. · Stands for: Plataforma Élfica de Defensa de los Derechos Obreros · Translators: Nieves Martín Azofra & Adolfo Muñoz García
Hermione's house-elf campaign is a two-part joke. The full name — Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare — is worthy and unwieldy in exactly the register of real student activism. The initials spell spew. Harry reads the badge, mispronounces it, and Hermione has to spell it out letter by letter.
To translate it you need an acronym that expands into a plausible campaign and contracts into something faintly disgusting, and the misreading scene has to still play on the page.
The Spanish is the one that keeps both halves. Harry picks up a badge and reads "¿Peddo?", one letter away from pedo, a fart, and that one letter is precisely what Hermione then has to close by hand: "No es 'peddo'. Es pe, e, de, de, o."
Nine languages, nine ways to sound disgusting
| Language | Acronym | Stands for | Heard as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | S.P.E.W. | Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare | spew |
| Spanish | P.E.D.D.O. | Plataforma Élfica de Defensa de los Derechos Obreros | pedo, a fart |
| French | S.A.L.E. | Société d'Aide à la Libération des Elfes | sale, dirty |
| German | B.ELFE.R. | Bund für ELFEnRechte |
The Vietnamese is the surprise. Lý Lan's is among the most hands-off translations there is — Hogwarts, Snape, Quidditch, Muggle, Gryffindor, Snitch, Quaffle and Bludger all left in English, the sphinx's riddle rendered literally, the Mirror of Erised's inscription simply footnoted — and here she produces an eight-initial monstrosity built backwards from its own punchline, so that the first three land on "runt duck egg".
Which is the real lesson of this list: no translation is uniformly domesticating or foreignising. Every one of them is a long series of local decisions about which jokes are load-bearing.
Also in the Spanish Harry Potter
- Spanish follows roughly the same rule as Turkish: keep the names, translate the descriptions. Hogwarts, Snape, Dumbledore, Gryffindor, Slytherin, Quidditch and Muggle all stay in English, and so do snitch, quaffle and bludger — but Death Eaters become mortífagos, the Sorting Hat is the Sombrero Seleccionador, a Portkey a traslador, and a Horcrux a Horrocrux. The Marauders are renamed wholesale: Wormtail is Colagusano, Padfoot Canuto, Moony Lunático, Prongs Cornamenta. Only two names bend to a constraint rather than a preference — Riddle respelt Ryddle so the anagram balances, and Erised replaced outright by Oesed, deseo backwards.
- The series exists in three regional adaptations: European, Latin American and Southern Cone.
- In 2003 a pirate Spanish Order of the Phoenix appeared in Venezuela five months before the licensed edition, with the anonymous translator's own confessions left in the text — including "Here comes something that I'm unable to translate, sorry." Two people were arrested.
7. Greek: Άντον Μόρβολ Χερτ Anton Morvol Hert
Replaces: Tom Marvolo Riddle · Literally: rearranges into "Lord Voldemort" · Translator: Kaíti Oikonómou
The most tightly constrained sentence in the series. In the Chamber of Secrets, Riddle writes his name in the air and rearranges it into I AM LORD VOLDEMORT. A translator has to invent a plausible-sounding name that anagrams into a sentence meaning "I am Lord Voldemort" in their language — and ideally keeps what the English surname does twice over, since Riddle is both an ordinary name and the word for a puzzle.
Most languages keep Tom and rebuild everything after it: the middle name always goes, and usually the surname with it: Jedusor, Valedro, Venster, Rowle. Greek is the only one I found that gave up Tom as well. Tom becomes Άντον (Anton), because otherwise the Greek letters would not balance.
The Tom Marvolo Riddle anagram in other languages
| Language | The name written in the air | Rearranges to | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | TOM MARVOLO RIDDLE | I AM LORD VOLDEMORT | — |
| Greek | ΑΝΤΟΝ ΜΟΡΒΟΛ ΧΕΡΤ | ΑΡΧΩΝ ΒΟΛΝΤΕΜΟΡΤ | "Lord Voldemort", with no verb and no pronoun |
| French | TOM ELVIS JEDUSOR | JE SUIS VOLDEMORT | "I am Voldemort" |
| German | TOM VORLOST RIDDLE | IST LORD VOLDEMORT |
I checked all nine of the working solutions letter by letter, and they fall into three groups.
Five are exact. French, German, Spanish, Finnish and Norwegian rearrange perfectly, with nothing left over.
Two trade a letter for its accented twin. Czech puts an unaccented A into RADDLE and takes an Á out of JÁ. Turkish swaps the dotted İ of RİDDLE for the dotless I of ADIMLORD, and in Turkish those genuinely are two different letters of the alphabet, not one letter wearing a hat.
Two take a real liberty, in mirror image of each other. The Greek is perfect except for a single character: the source has three omicrons, the target has two omicrons and an omega. Greek has two letters for the same /o/ sound, and the translator treated them as interchangeable, a phonetic anagram rather than an orthographic one. Hungarian goes the other way: ROWLE supplies one W where NEVEM VOLDEMORT needs two Vs — a letter conjured out of nothing, except that the Hungarian name for W is dupla vé, "double v".
The French solution deserves its own mention, because Ménard did not stop at the anagram. Jedusor is a homophone of jeu du sort, "game of fate" or "spell-play". He then wrote a clause into Riddle's speech that does not exist in English, in which Voldemort sneers at "the 'jeu du sort' that gave me that filthy name Jedusor". The translator rebuilt the puzzle and then had the villain explain his own pun. Ménard is the only translator here who kept both halves of what Riddle does.
Also in the Greek Harry Potter
- The Greek edition mostly transcribes rather than translates — Χόγκουαρτς, Μαγκλ, Γκρίφιντορ, Σλίθεριν all arrive respelt rather than remade, a policy Máia Roútsou set in book one and Oikonómou inherited from the second. The anagram is the place where transcription simply cannot work, and it is the only name in the Greek books rebuilt from the first letter on.
- Not everything, though: Fluffy the three-headed dog becomes Λουλούκο, Diagon Alley becomes Η Διαγώνιος Αλέα and the Sorting Hat Το καπέλο της επιλογής.
- The Greek Chamber of Secrets opens with a prologue by the novelist Manos Kontoleon, which begins by informing the reader: "I must inform you from the outset that, sadly, you belong — like me and many others — to the world of the… Muggles."
- There is also an Ancient Greek Harry Potter, translated by Andrew Wilson and, by his own reckoning, the longest text written in Ancient Greek since Heliodorus of Emesa in the third century AD. It took him about a year. Wilson's Quidditch is Ἰκαροσφαιρική, "the Icarus ball-game" — a sport where children fly and chase a golden object, named for the boy who flew too near the sun. Halloween becomes the Nekysia, the Athenian festival of the dead.
8. Japanese: みぞの鏡 Mizo no Kagami
Replaces: the Mirror of Erised · Literally: "the Mirror of the Ditch" · Translator: Yuko Matsuoka
"Erised" is "desire" backwards, and the frame carries the inscription Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi — "I show not your face but your heart's desire", reversed.
This looks impossible in Japanese, though not for the obvious reason. Kana reverse perfectly well: each one is a single syllable, and flipping them leaves you something a reader can still pronounce. The problem is kanji: a Chinese character is a morpheme rather than a sound and will not turn round at all, so an ordinarily written sentence reverses into nothing. Matsuoka's solution was to write the inscription out in hiragana, the plain syllable script, with no kanji in it anywhere. Then she inverted it:
わたしは あなたの かお ではなく あなたの こころの のぞみを うつすすつうを みぞの のろここ のたなあ くなはで おか のたなあ はしたわ
read backwards: わたしは あなたの かお ではなく あなたの こころの のぞみを うつす
"I reflect not your face but the desire of your heart."
And the mirror's name falls straight out of it. Reverse nozomi のぞみ, "desire", and you get みぞの: mizo plus the no that Japanese already uses to mean "of". Better still, mizo is a real word: 溝, a ditch, and figuratively the gulf that opens between two people. So みぞの鏡 can be heard as "the Mirror of the Gulf", the distance between what you want and what is actually in the room. Writing it in hiragana rather than 溝 keeps both readings alive at once.
Mirror of Erised translations, language by language
| Language | The mirror is called | Reversal of |
|---|---|---|
| English | the Mirror of Erised | desire |
| Japanese | みぞの鏡 | nozomi, desire — and mizo, "ditch" |
| French | le Miroir du Riséd | désir |
| German | der Spiegel Nerhegeb | Begehren, longing |
| Dutch | de Spiegel van Neregeb | begeren, to desire |
| Swedish | -spegeln |
Two of those are half-solutions, and both are visible on the page. The Czech inscription is beautifully done — Mízar bozyhu otešave lařáv ten unpicks to "not your face, but your desires I will show" — and yet the mirror itself is still called "the Mirror from Erised", as though Erised were a place. The Turkish does exactly the opposite: the mirror is correctly renamed Kelid, but the inscription around the frame is left as reversed English, which no Turkish reader can unpick.
Mainland Chinese transcribed the reversed English phonetically into meaningless characters and added a footnote calling it "a secret Daoist charm". That is not misdirection so much as a translator sealing the box: the reader is told the words are a charm, and given no route back to the English.
The interpreter who talked her way into the Japanese rights
In October 1998, Yuko Matsuoka, a Tokyo conference interpreter, was visiting old friends in Richmond, on the edge of London. Her husband Yukio had died the previous Christmas, leaving behind Say-zan-sha, a tiny publishing house devoted to social history and human rights, which she had resolved to keep alive in his memory. Her friends handed her a children's book that was selling out across Britain.
She read it in one night, telephoned J.K. Rowling's agent the next day, and, by her own account, pleaded for two months. On 8 December 1998 the answer came back: "I spoke with the author. We have decided to go with you."
She had never translated a novel. She had no marketing budget. She paid for the first print run out of her own pocket. Then she assembled an ad-hoc editorial team from university juniors and a children's-book translation club, and commissioned the cover from the painter friend who had lent her the book.
It was published in December 1999, and the first printing was gone within weeks. Matsuoka went on to translate all seven volumes, supervise the Japanese subtitles and dubbing, and in 2009 convene the first International Conference for Harry Potter Translators in Paris.
Also in the Japanese Harry Potter
- Hagrid speaks Tōhoku dialect — provincial, northern, warm — which does roughly the same social work for a Japanese reader that West Country does for an English one.
- Names are mostly straight katakana, which is simply what Japanese does with any foreign proper noun. The invention is saved for the places where a word is carrying a joke.
- Knockturn Alley is printed as 夜の闇横丁, "Darkness-of-the-Night Alley", with ノクターン nokutān set above it as the reading. The page tells you the meaning in Japanese and instructs you to pronounce it as what looks like an English word — which Japanese readers will connect to nocturne.
9. Russian: Злотеус Злей Zloteus Zley
Replaces: Severus Snape · Literally: something like "Meanteus Meaner" · Translator: Maria Spivak, for Machaon
Included not because it is good, but because it fails at one job so cleanly that it shows you what the job was.
Rowling's "Snape" does a lot of quiet work. It is a real English place name with a whiff of menace and no verdict in it. It sits next to snake, snipe, snap. And that reserve is load-bearing, because the entire architecture of seven books depends on the reader suspecting him and never being able to settle it. Snape has to stay suspectable for seven books without ever being provable.
Злей is the Russian comparative "more evil". Злотеус welds зло, evil, to a mock-Latin ending. The whole name reads as something like "Meanteus Meaner". There is nothing left to doubt. An English child spends seven books suspecting Snape and never quite able to prove it, and that unresolved argument is the machine the plot runs on. A Russian child is handed the answer on page one and never gets to have the argument at all.
The publishing history behind the retranslation is its own drama, and it runs the other way from what you would guess. Rosman published the first Russian series, and it changed hands constantly: book one went to Igor Oranskij, books two to five to Marina Litvinova, the last two to a rotating cast. Book five alone carries four names, one of them Viktor Golyshev — a distinguished translator of Faulkner and Orwell who made no secret of disdaining the material. When Rosman's licence lapsed, Machaon took over and did the opposite: one translator, all seven books.
That translator was Maria Spivak, who retranslated the whole series single-handed. Her version has its defenders. This name does not. Russian readers have been arguing about them ever since.
How everyone else handled Snape
| Language | Snape becomes | What it does to him |
|---|---|---|
| English | Snape | a real place name with a whiff of menace; verdict withheld |
| Finnish | Kalkaros | from kalkkarokäärme, rattlesnake: the snake gets louder, the verdict is still withheld |
| French | Rogue | haughty, disdainful: accurate, and gives nothing away |
| Italian, Hungarian | Piton | "python": the snake said out loud, the man still unjudged |
| Dutch | Sneep | the English sound in Dutch spelling: menace and deniability both carried over |
The comparison that matters is Finnish Kalkaros and French Rogue. Both translators did rename him. Both picked something meaningful. Neither settled the question for the reader. And Finnish is not even alone in taking the Snape/snake problem head-on, since Italian and Hungarian both simply say python. But Kalkaros is the one that keeps the snake buried the way Rowling did, inside a word that does not look like a snake at all. None of the three says a word about which side he is on.
Also in the Russian Harry Potter
- Not everything in Spivak's version went badly. Fred's joke about the "P for prefect" on Percy's sweater cannot work in Russian, where prefect is староста, so her Fred announces the P stands for пуп земли, "the navel of the earth". The Weasley sweater itself becomes a portmanteau, Уизвитер, "Weas-weater".
- The form circulates in two spellings, Злотеус and Злодеус: the second closer to злодей, a villain, which stops describing his temperament and starts assigning him his part in the plot.
10. Polish: szmalcownicy
Replaces: the Snatchers · Literally: "greasy-palmers" · Translator: Andrzej Polkowski
The heaviest word here, and the one that shows what happens when a translator decides the local history is more powerful than the invented one.
In Deathly Hallows, the Snatchers are freelance bounty hunters under the Voldemort regime who track down Muggle-borns and blood traitors and sell them to the Ministry. Rowling's word is low and plain: snatch, a grab, the verb English uses for a child taken off a street.
Andrzej Polkowski did not coin anything. He reached for szmalcownicy — a real Polish word from the German occupation, for the people who blackmailed Jews in hiding, or blackmailed the Poles who were sheltering them, or handed either over to the German authorities for money.
And, improbably, it is built on the same image as Poudlard, all the way back at the top of this list. It comes from German Schmalz (Polish szmalc, lard), which in criminal slang meant the money changing hands. Two unrelated words for pig fat: one names a school, the other names the men who sold their neighbours. A szmalcownik is, literally, a greasy-palmer. In Warsaw alone some three to four thousand people did it, and by the summer of 1943 the Polish Home Army had begun carrying out death sentences for it.
It is not a historical analogy offered to the reader. It is the actual noun, still corrosive in Polish, dropped into a children's fantasy about a regime that hunts people for their blood. He did not invent a parallel; he used the word Polish already had. That makes it the heaviest single word in any translation here, and it arguably tells Polish readers outright what English readers are left to infer.
The translator who explained his own homework
Polkowski's method everywhere else was conservative, and unusually transparent about it. He kept Harry Potter, Dumbledore, Snape, Malfoy, Longbottom and Voldemort in English, on the plain principle that a person's surname is not translated. He kept the four house names too, and there his stated reason was practical: so that Polish children could discuss the books with their English-speaking peers.
Then he did something unusual. He appended a glossary to the volumes, explaining the harder names — including, pointedly, the ones he had left in English — along with units of measurement and English dishes. That "dumbledore" is an old word for a bumblebee, which matters because the headmaster hums to himself. That draco is Latin for dragon or serpent. That Malfoy is "bad faith" in old French.
Rather than smuggle the puns in the names into Polish, he handed readers the key and let them unlock the English themselves. It is the same move we recommend to learners who use books to grow their vocabulary: read the real thing, and keep a key within reach. It runs the other way from the Czech and Dutch, who rebuilt the puns inside their own language rather than leaving any of them for the reader to unlock. Both are defensible, and for opposite reasons: Polkowski trusts a child to do some of the work, the Czech and Dutch trust a child to accept a world rebuilt from scratch.
Also in the Polish Harry Potter
- Muggle is mugol, and a Muggle-born a mugolak. Polkowski's first attempt was tuman, "dolt", which was overruled editorially; mugol was chosen because it patterns with mildly rude Polish demonyms like Angol and Jugol.
- The house names stay English, but their students do not: Gryffindors are Gryfoni and Slytherins Ślizgoni. Polish needed a form it could decline, and having to build one, he put the gryphon and the slither back in.
- Cornelius Fudge is Korneliusz Knot — a knot in Polish is a candle-wick, and figuratively a botch or a dud. It does the same job the English surname does.
- Dobby is Zgredek, from zgred, a codger. Kreacher is Stworek, "little creature". Wormtail is Glizdogon, from glizda, earthworm, plus ogon, tail: a straight calque, with the worm pinned down to one particular worm.
- A Portkey is a świstoklik: świst, a whistling sound, welded to a click.
- Hogwarts became Hogwart, one letter shorter and no less opaque: hog means nothing in Polish, so the pig was gone either way. Polkowski put the pig back by hand. In the digital omnibus the school sings "Hogwart, Hogwart, Świński Hogwart" — "Hogwart, Hogwart, Piggy Hogwart" — restoring in the song what the name itself could no longer carry. (The 1998 print edition sang a different line again; the Polish text has been revised more than once.)
- Where meaning was doing real work, he did translate: Irytek for Peeves (from irytować, to irritate), Parszywek for Scabbers, ulica Pokątna for Diagon Alley (pokątny meaning shady or under-the-counter), Tiara Przydziału for the Sorting Hat and for the Death Eaters.
What none of these translators would do
Ten problems, ten languages, and ten different ideas about what a translator owes a reader. Ménard rebuilt the pig. Kapari-Jatta invented a Latin of her own. Viswanath went to a proverb. Matsuoka went to the shape of her own syllabary. Polkowski went to one of the most corrosive nouns in the language. They converge now and then — Italian and Hungarian both landed on Piton without consulting each other, and half of Europe kept Hogwarts' warts and let the pig go — but never for long.
What none of them did was the obvious thing, because the obvious thing does not exist. You cannot simply write down what these words meant: there is nothing to write down. Hogwarts, Quidditch and Erised are sounds doing the work of sense, and you cannot look any of them up. Muggle is the one that bends the rule — it leans on mug, and a word for a fool is something every language already has, which is why so many of them found one. Everywhere else you can only work out what a word is doing to an English reader and then build a machine that does the same thing to yours.
That is why the failures in this list are so specific. The Russian Злотеус Злей is not a mistranslation; it is an over-translation, a name that hands down a verdict the English deliberately withholds, and the wrong verdict at that. The Vietnamese sphinx is not laziness either; it is a translator who invented freely elsewhere, the runt-duck-egg acronym being hers, deciding that this particular puzzle was not worth rebuilding and letting Harry reach the answer anyway. Every entry here is somebody choosing what to lose.
And the choices went on being made after publication. Italian readers watched Ravenclaw stop being a black sheep and become a raven, three books in. Russian readers got two incompatible Snapes a decade apart. Somewhere there are now Chinese speakers calling each other máguā who have never read a word of Harry Potter, which is about as complete a victory as a translated invented word can have. If these ten entries have you itching to see a translation firsthand, Harry Potter is the modern Rosetta Stone makes the case for reading one, and our Harry Potter decks teach you the first book's vocabulary so you can do it.
Keep the magic going in another language
You just read about translators rebuilding Hogwarts, Quidditch, and Muggle from scratch. The best way to appreciate their work is to read it in context. We turned the first book into vocabulary decks for four languages, so you can learn the words before you read and understand way more from page one.
See how the Harry Potter decks workPick your language:
No. Refold Languages Inc is an independent language-learning company. This deck is a vocabulary study aid built from our own analysis of the book, and it is not endorsed by, affiliated with, sponsored by, or approved by Warner Bros., J.K. Rowling, or any rights holder. We reference the book title only to identify the source text the vocabulary is drawn from. All trademarks and copyrights belong to their respective owners.
Frequently asked questions
How was Harry Potter translated into so many languages?
Publishers licensed the books territory by territory and hired translators locally, with no shared glossary passing between them — each translator made their own decisions about which invented words to rebuild and which to leave alone. Once the series became a global event the publisher stopped letting anyone see a manuscript before the English release, so from then on translators worked from the finished English book under heavy time pressure, with no idea what happened in later volumes.
How many languages has Harry Potter been translated into?
Around 85, including Latin, Ancient Greek, Scots, Welsh, Hawaiian, Māori, Yiddish, Kazakh and Greenlandic. Bloomsbury announced 79 authorised translations at the twentieth anniversary in 2017 and has licensed several more since.
Why did Harry Potter translations take so long to come out?
To stop plot leaks, translators were refused any access to the manuscript before the English publication date. A translator in Helsinki learned what happened at the same moment as a child in Bristol: by buying a copy. Pavel Medek, one of the two Czech translators, bought Order of the Phoenix on the morning of Saturday 21 June 2003 ("if my memory serves me correctly"), was on page 500 by that evening, finished reading on the Tuesday and started translating on the Wednesday.
How long did it take to translate a Harry Potter book?
Weeks, not months, once the books became a global event. The Ukrainian team turned Deathly Hallows around in roughly nine weeks to publish first. Jean-François Ménard worked twelve-hour days from 6am. Hungary's Tóth Tamás Boldizsár had from late July to mid-October to hit a Christmas release. Czech readers got Order of the Phoenix from a translator who started work four days after buying the English edition in a shop. The outlier is Andrew Wilson's Ancient Greek Philosopher's Stone, which took about a year, but nobody was waiting for it.
Which language got the last Harry Potter book first?
Ukrainian. A-BA-BA-HA-LA-MA-HA in Kyiv published Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on 25 September 2007: the first translation into any language anywhere, which the publisher said Rowling's London office had confirmed in advance. Viktor Morozov translated it, with Oleksa Nehrebetskyi and the publisher Ivan Malkovych editing. The English edition had come out on 21 July, which gave the team about nine weeks.
Who translated Harry Potter into other languages?
A partial roll-call of the translators named in this article: Jean-François Ménard (French), Yuko Matsuoka (Japanese), Jaana Kapari-Jatta (Finnish), Arun Schaechter Viswanath (Yiddish), Sevin Okyay and Kutlukhan Kutlu (Turkish), Kaíti Oikonómou (Greek), Nieves Martín Azofra and Adolfo Muñoz García (Spanish), Andrzej Polkowski (Polish), Maria Spivak and, before her, Igor Oranskij and Marina Litvinova (Russian), Vladimír and Pavel Medek (Czech), Wiebe Buddingh' (Dutch), Tóth Tamás Boldizsár (Hungarian), Torstein Bugge Høverstad (Norwegian), Lý Lan (Vietnamese), Viktor Morozov (Ukrainian), Marina Astrologo and Beatrice Masini (Italian), and Ma Ainong with Cao Suling (Simplified Chinese).
Are there unauthorised Harry Potter translations?
Many — pirate editions have shadowed the series since the beginning. An unauthorised Chinese Deathly Hallows appeared three days after the English release. A sixteen-year-old in France was arrested for serialising his own. Iran, which is not a party to the Universal Copyright Convention, is the extreme case: the collector-researcher behind Potterglot has catalogued 96 unauthorised Persian translations, including seventeen different Persian versions of Philosopher's Stone alone.
Did any Harry Potter translation ever have to be corrected?
Italy's, publicly and in detail. Salani's original translation named Ravenclaw Pecoranera, "black sheep": assonant, fairy-tale, and completely wrong, because the Hogwarts crest puts a lion, a snake, a badger and a bird of prey around the school's initial, and Salani could not know what that bird would turn out to be. Ravenclaw was renamed Corvonero, "black raven", at Goblet of Fire, and the editor explained why in a published note.
In 2014 Salani issued a revised edition, and each volume of the digital edition carries a Glossario delle modifiche: a list of the names that changed and what they used to be. McGranitt went back to McGonagall, Caramell back to Fudge, Paciock back to Longbottom, Baston back to Wood. The names that survived (Silente, Piton, Grifondoro, Serpeverde, Babbani) were the ones Italian readers had grown up loving.
Why does Avada Kedavra stay the same in almost every language?
Because inside the fiction the spells are already a foreign language. Rowling's pseudo-Latin does not sound like English to an English child either, so leaving it alone preserves the effect rather than losing it. Avada Kedavra also works by echoing abracadabra, which is internationally recognisable in its own right. The exception is Finnish, which rebuilt the entire spell system, and even there Avada Kedavra and Alohomora were left untouched.
Which Harry Potter translation is the most different from the English?
By volume of invention, Czech and Dutch. The Czech gives you Bradavice (Hogwarts), Brumbál (Dumbledore), Famfrpál (Quidditch), mudla (Muggle), mozkomor (Dementor), Smrtijed (Death Eater) and viteál (Horcrux). The Dutch goes further still, consistently making names more meaningful than Rowling made them: Trelawney, a neutral Cornish surname, becomes Zwamdrift, roughly "waffle-mania", and the Quick-Quotes Quill becomes the Fantaciteer-Veer, the "fantasi-quote quill".
Was J.K. Rowling ever unhappy with a Harry Potter translation?
At least once, on record. In Conversations with J.K. Rowling she objected to the Italian Silente for Dumbledore, which came from reading "dumb" as "silent", when "dumbledore" is an old Devon word for bumblebee. The Czech Brumbál is an archaic Czech word for exactly that insect: the solution her own etymology called for.
Sources and methodology
Most of the translated words quoted here were read out of the published text. The working corpus is 63 EPUB files, some single volumes and some omnibus editions, covering 18 languages: Czech, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Polish, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Vietnamese — extracted to plain text and searched directly. Counts are raw counts from those files. Anagrams were checked letter by letter rather than by eye, treating no two characters as equivalent; the character-substitution findings in the Czech, Turkish, Greek and Hungarian solutions all came out of that check.
The corpus is complete for some languages and partial for others: it holds all seven books in English, Czech, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Spanish and Turkish, six of the seven in Vietnamese (Chamber of Secrets is missing), and only the first book or two in Dutch, Greek, Japanese, Mandarin, Serbian, Swedish and Galician. Where a Dutch, Japanese or Chinese form comes from a later volume — Zwamdrift, the Fantaciteer-Veer, the Knockturn Alley device — it comes from Cees Koster or from cjvlang, not from the books directly.
Words attributed to Yiddish, Ancient Greek, Latin, Norwegian, Russian, Hebrew, Ukrainian and Persian come from the sources below, since there is no edition of those in the corpus. One passage carries a further caveat: Yuko Matsuoka's own afterword covers how she got the rights, but the detail of what happened afterwards comes from a machine-generated synopsis of her memoir, and the memoir itself has not been read for this piece. Etymological readings of invented words are interpretation unless attributed directly. Ménard on Poudlard and Moldu, Kapari-Jatta on huispaus, Viswanath on shisbezem, Tóth on Roxfort, Polkowski on mugol and Høverstad on rumpeldunk are the translators' own accounts; the note on the Italian houses is Salani's editor, Serena Daniele, not a translator. Everything else — including the Czech, Finnish, Dutch, Serbian, Russian and Norwegian glosses, and the "made from" column of the Finnish spell table — is a reading.