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Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone |
Chapter 11: Quidditch
(For the romanisation of Chinese and Japanese, see Transliteration. To understand the writing systems of CJV, see Writing Systems. For word order notes, see Word Order)
Where a Vietnamese word has been borrowed from Chinese, the original Chinese characters are shown in parentheses.
| Chinese (Mainland) | 魁地奇比赛 Kuídìqí bǐsài |
魁地奇 Kuídìqí
= 'Quidditch' (phonetic). 比赛 bǐsài = 'match, game' |
Quidditch game |
| Chinese (Taiwan) | 魁地奇比賽 Kuídìqí bǐsài |
魁地奇
Kuídìqí
= 'Quidditch' (phonetic). 比賽 bǐsài = 'match, game'. |
Quidditch game |
| Japanese | クィディッチ Kwiditchi |
クィディッチ Kwiditchi = 'Quidditch'. | Quidditch |
| Vietnamese | Quidditch | Quidditch (pronunciation: Quít-đit). | Quidditch |
All translations represent 'Quidditch' phonetically. To represent foreign words phonetically, Chinese uses characters for their sound rather than their meaning. In this case, the characters 魁地奇 have the meaning 'chief/head' or 'stalwart' + 'ground' + 'strange'. Although they don't make a lot of sense, you can be pretty sure that the translator thought carefully when choosing these characters over the other possibilities. (For instance, 'qui' could have been represented by 亏 kuī 'loss' or 潰 / 溃 kuì 'ulcer', neither of which would have been at all suitable.)
Japanese uses katakana, a phonetic script in which each syllable is shown as a single letter. In fact, the 'di' sound in Kwiditchi was originally a foreign sound combination for Japanese speakers and couldn't be represented in katakana. They came up with a makeshift way of indicating this new sound by combining two letters デ+ィ (de plus small i) and giving them the pronounciation 'di'. Similarly, the letters ク+ィ (ku plus small i) are an attempt to represent English 'qui'. The use of クィ is fairly progressive in its way. Japanese traditionally converts a 'qu' into a simple 'k', as in リキッド rikiddo (rather than リクィッド rikwiddo) for 'liquid'. (For more information on this phenomenon, see this page on The case of the disappearing "w").
(A summary of this chapter can be found at Harry Potter Facts. Detailed notes on the chapter can be found at Harry Potter Lexicon)
 Chapter 10 |
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