New Delhi, Nov 14: Great news is here for Harry Potter fans in India. The Hindi translation of the first Potter book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which in Hindi is called Harry Potter aur Paras Pathar, is now ready and will hit the stands in 1,500 cities, towns and villages on November 14 as an unique celebration of Children’s Day.
To be launched by deputy prime minister L.K. Advani, the book has been translated by Bhopal’s Dr Sudhir Dixit and then analysed and reviewed by a 11-year-old boy, Akhilesh Pandey, who suggested how the book could be made even easier for children to read. Dr Dixit read the English version 35 times and watched the Hindi dubbed version of the film 30 times before starting to translate.
Manjul Publishing House of Bhopal, which edged out big names vying for the translation rights, said the first print run will have 40,000 copies and will be sold for Rs 165.
The Malayalam, Gujarati and Marathi translations of the book will hit the stands by January 2004.
Speaking about how difficult it was to translate Harry Potter, Dr Dixit, who has earlier translated over 20 books, told The Asian Age: "It was quite a challenge, first because it was an international bestseller, and even worse, it was a children’s book. I faced several difficulties while translating it. First, the book had too many uncommon fictitious titles of books and the author hadn’t offered us choice or list of translated words for all of them. We also could not change words whenever we wanted, because of strict guidelines from our agent. We have so many options for a single word, but our choice was restrainted. Establishing the pronunciation of difficult words in Hindi was also tough. The book also had a lot of cookery items, which could not be translated into Hindi. Some original words were tough but had to be kept intact. I took nearly five months to translate the book, during which all I did was think about Harry Potter."
Mr Vikas Makhija, vice-president of Manjul Publishing House, said: "We have the exclusive licence for the Harry Potter books. We met the agent in the UK twice and got the deal since we are renowned for translations. We have translations of over 50 international bestsellers, including Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved my Cheese which was translated in six languages. The Harry Potter book is an exact translation since we weren’t allowed to change anything. The book will be distributed in seven states through 2,500 hawkers and agents. After Dr Dixit translated it, we used 11-year-old Akhilesh to guide us. His suggestions led us to change several difficult Hindi words and replace them with simple Hindi since Indian children are neither good in Hindi nor English."