A Descriptive Study On The Mainland And Taiwan Versions Of Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince-A Cultural Approach

The Harry Potter series has oddly been neglected in the field of translation studies despite the fact that it has been translated into 64 languages and ranked third in the literary charts in terms of the number of books sold. To fill the gap, I intend to conduct a descriptive study on the two Chinese versions of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (a simplified-Chinese version published in the Chinese Mainland and a traditional-Chinese version in Taiwan) from a cultural perspective by drawing upon the concepts of domestication and foreignization. As the title suggests, my paper attempts to explore the validity of strategies for translating cultural elements in the two versions rather than give a judgment as to which one has outdone the other. The comparison would be mainly conducted from four perspectives: the text-type, the readership, the skopos and poetics, that is, factors belonging to preliminary norms. The guidance of operational norms will be demonstrated in the chapter of case studies, a part in which Nida's four-step process is adopted to testify the effect of the translation of culture-loaded elements in six categories, namely, ecology, material, social, linguistic, gestures and habit, and organizations, customs, activities, procedures and concepts. In the conclusion part, I would argue that translation is inevitably constrained by certain norms due to its socio-cultural trait. It is impractical to establish prescriptive rules for translation because culture is multi-faceted and norms do change with time and place, thus cultural transfer also requires a multi-pronged approach instead of enforcing standards of one culture onto another.