Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Bogus Harry Potter Book In China

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the how-to-make-some-ebay-scratch dept.

elveu writes "Chinese Harry Potter fans have been blessed with the fifth book early -- only it's not the real one. The title translates to 'Harry Potter And Leopard Walk Up To Dragon.' The story has Harry getting turned into a fat hairy drawf and being void of his powers."

7 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. Collectors item by tsa · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This will be a good collectors item.

    --

    -- Cheers!

  2. Publ. FAQ on upcoming Book 5 by ancarett · · Score: 2, Insightful

    From the Bloomsbury website:

    "JK Rowling is happily writing the fifth Harry Potter book and we will announce a publication date once we have received the finished manuscript. As soon as we have any more news about the publication date we will update this area."

    It's also well known that the fifth book will be titled "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." Book 4, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" was published in July of 2000. 2 years and counting. . . no wonder the fakes are emerging!

    --
    ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
  3. Globalism, culture, and franchise by Lemmy+Caution · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I don't see it that way. For one thing, it's not piracy - she didn't write this book (I don't read Chinese, so I couldn't tell whether they attributed the book to her or not, but in any case, it's an original work.) In Mexico, you can find a lot of street-artisans who make paper-mache versions of Tweety-Bird, Bugs Bunny, Spider-Man, and the like, and create an informal visual culture based on images that were otherwise completely imported. This is a way of adapting to the fact of being completely overwhelmed by culture industries from overseas.

    I think of this as a combination of a fan-fic and street-level gray-market good. It's the adaptation of a local culture to a global one, and I think it's vital. After all, just who did Disney pay and ask permission from to use the characters in Mu-Lan, or the Lion King, or any of the other non-Western cultural figures that they freely profit from?

  4. Re:Figures this is newsworthy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    Well, the U.S. is ran by a two party dictatorship...

  5. People seem to be taken for granted.... by cyberon22 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... that this book is poorly written. Direct translations from any language usually sound horrible. Chinese-English translations are particularly difficult because many language constructions in Chinese just don't have English equivalents. The same goes for English text simply translated into Chinese.

    So while the article linked above mocks the book on the basis of its first sentence. I'd be curious to know if the author (who is seemingly a native English-speaker) has read the original Harry Potter books in their Chinese translation. Is this one really worse???

    Frankly, I'd imagine that if this thing is selling as many copies as the author claims, it's either because it's well written, or because it's fooling a lot of people. And if it's fooling a lot of people, that probably means it's well written. Either that or Rowling needs to get some better English-Chinese translators....

  6. what concerns me by lingqi · · Score: 4, Insightful
    is not that there is a book and what not, but as the story has pointed out:

    This is a case which we are aware of and, as with all piracy matters throughout the world, take this issue extremely seriously.

    i am sorry, HUH? piracy matters? wtf does that have to do with this? This is more like infringement of copyright of the Harry Potter name, but there are other people writing fan fictions -- the only thing this author is guilty of is probabbly the fact that he pretended to be Rowling, but throughout the story it appears that he did not try to do that anyway, nor does people really think that he is Rowling because of the difference in writing style etc; so it just boils down to that a fan-fiction got published and we are taking it *way* too seriously because Rowlings believes it's taking away some of her money. good grief people.

    --

    My life in the land of the rising sun.

  7. Re:They used her picture on the back of the book.. by Some+Dumbass... · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The Harry Potter series as a whole is an allegory of a series of works by Foucault.

    You mean Foucault the philosopher who writes about how social institutions are just power structures used as a means of social control? Not likely.

    That Flintstones bit was weird enough, but this is just silly (Assuming that I understand you correctly -- the grammar in the sentence I quoted is horrid!) If you actually believe this (which I doubt) then let's hear some details.