Hogwarts, Muggles and Quidditch: A Study of the Translation of Names in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter Books

The aim of this C-essay is to discuss the translation of some of the names in J.K. Rowling’s immensely popular Harry Potter books and look at how the translation agrees with and/or deviates from the original. Special focus is put on features such as alliterations, allusions and imaginative inventions, which are characteristic of J.K Rowling’s style and may be particularly tricky and challenging when translating.A comparison is made between the names in the original texts and the translated texts. The names are divided into different categories, such as names of characters, places etc. I argue that the translator uses different strategies when translating different types of names. Focus is on the Swedish translation, but Norwegian examples are included too.

Den moderna frälsaren : En komparativ analys av Harry Potter och Jesus

The books about Harry Potter have been read by people all over the world, but is there some-thing more to them than just the magical adventure novels they first appear to be? Many have discovered the multiple layers of understanding that the author J. K. Rowling has put in her famous books, and since I was curious about a few features in the story that reminded me of certain elements which can be found in the Bible, I decided to find out more. The following essay investigates which specific features in the books about Harry Potter that can be traced to which specific parts of the Bible. The main focus is the comparison between the character Harry Potter and Jesus Christ. I use a comparative analyzing method and secure my theory with quotes from both Harry Potter and the Bible. In the end, I found a wide range of similarities between the two characters, and in my discus-sion, I raised the question whether or not the likenesses were intentional by Rowling. I reached the conclusion that the authors intention is not as important as the reader’s interpreta-tion and what they can learn from it.

Fan Culture as an Informal Learning Environment : Presentation of a NGL project

Fan culture is a subculture that has developed explosively on the internet over the last decades. Fans are creating their own films, translations, fiction, fan art, blogs, role play and also various forms that are all based on familiar popular culture creations like TV-series, bestsellers, anime, manga stories and games. In our project, we analyze two of these subculture genres, fan fiction and scanlation. Amateurs, and sometimes professional writers, create new stories by adapting and developing existing storylines and characters from the original. In this way, a "network" of texts occurs, and writers step into an intertextual dialogue with established writers such as JK Rowling (Harry Potter) and Stephanie Meyer (Twilight). Literary reception and creation then merge into a rich reciprocal creative activity which includes comments and feedback from the participators in the community. The critical attitude of the fans regarding quality and the frustration at waiting for the official translation of manga books led to the development of scanlation, which is an amateur translation of manga distributed on the internet.  Today, young internet users get involved in conceptual discussions of intertextuality and narrative structures through fan activity. In the case of scanlation, the scanlators practice the skills and techniques of translating in an informal environment. This phenomenon of participatory culture has been observed by scholars and it is concluded that they contribute to the development of a student’s literacy and foreign language skills. Furthermore, there is no doubt that the fandom related to Japanese cultural products such as manga, anime and videogames is one of the strong motives for foreign students to start learning Japanese. This is something to take into pedagogical consideration when we develop web-based courses. Fan fiction and fan culture make it ​​possible to have an intensive transcultural dialogue between participators throughout the world and is of great interest when studying the interaction between formal and informal learning that puts the student in focus

Publikdragande namn eller aktivistermed drag i? : Om symboliskt kapital som maktresurs i den globala rättviserörelsens lokala organiseringsarbete

Crowd-pulling names or energetic activists? On symbolic capital as a power resource in the local organizational work within the global justice movement The article explores the global emergence of local Social Forums by means of an ethnographic study of the organization of the Stockholm Social Forum. In international academic debate, the forums are often discussed as a “globalization from below” and a new deliberative democratic process. However, empirical research on the organizational process, and its power relations, has been very limited. The theoretical concept symbolic capital (Bourdieu) and concepts from conversation analysis (CA) are used to analyze how power in terms of priority of interpretation is constructed in conversations between activists with differing political backgrounds. A detailed empirical analysis is based on the case of an internal discussion about inviting keynote speakers to the local forum. The results show how transnational networks and specific knowledge about the global social forum process became symbolic capital in the organizational process. Holders of this specific form of symbolic capital gained priority of interpretation in the internal discussions. This had an impact on the practical outcome of the organizational process in terms of the symbolic framing of the Social Forum. It is argued that the social forum process produces specific forms of cultural distinctions, social hierarchies and patterns of exclusion.

Initiation into engineering : stability and change in gender orders

This article examines processes of doing gender during the initiation of students into engineering programs at university level in Sweden. The article draws on interviews with students, focusing on their understandings of gender. The aim is to explore difficulties with and challenges to traditional gender roles in an academic male dominated arena, by using theories of doing and undoing gender. The empirical material reveals the initiation period or ‘reception’ as a phenomenon both reinforcing and challenging traditional orders. The attempts to challenge norms meet resistance, revealing two paradoxes and one dilemma. In the first paradox the formal purpose of the reception (inclusion) is partly at odds with its informal consequence (exclusion of deviations). The second paradox concerns the contradictory effects of the reception. Even though the reception ensures participation of women, it reinforces existing hierarchies including gender inequality. This results in a dilemma, since in order to protect individual safety, there is a taboo on harassing women which then reproduces stable gender stereotypes. So while harassment taints the respect senior students must earn during the reception, the fact that female students exist in the engineering field challenges the established order and opens the way for change.

Dissonant Voices : Philosophy, Children's Literature, and Perfectionist Education

Dissonant Voices has a twofold aspiration. First, it is a philosophical treatment of everyday pedagogical interactions between children and their elders, between teachers and pupils. More specifically it is an exploration of the possibilities to go on with dissonant voices that interrupt established practices – our attunement – in behaviour, practice and thinking. Voices that are incomprehensible or expressions that are unacceptable, morally or otherwise. The text works on a tension between two inclinations: an inclination to wave off, discourage, or change an expression that is unacceptable or unintelligible; and an inclination to be tolerant and accept the dissonant expression as doing something worthwhile, but different. The second aspiration is a philosophical engagement with children’s literature. Reading children’s literature becomes a form of philosophising, a way to explore the complexity of a range of philosophical issues. This turn to literature marks a dissatisfaction with what philosophy can accomplish through argumentation and what philosophy can do with a particular and limited set of concepts for a subject, such as ethics. It is a way to go beyond philosophising as the founding of theories that justify particular responses. The philosophy of dissonance and children’s literature becomes a way to destabilise justifications of our established practices and ways of interacting. The philosophical investigations of dissonance are meant to make manifest the possibilities and risks of engaging in interactions beyond established agreement or attunements. Thinking of the dissonant voice as an expression beyond established practices calls for improvisation. Such improvisations become a perfectionist education where both the child and the elder, the teacher and the student, search for as yet unattained forms of interaction and take responsibility for every word and action of the interaction. The investigation goes through a number of picture books and novels for children such as Harry Potter, Garmann’s Summer, and books by Shaun Tan, Astrid Lindgren and Dr. Seuss as well narratives by J.R.R. Tolkien, Henrik Ibsen, Jane Austen and Henry David Thoreau. These works of fiction are read in conversation with philosophical works of, and inspired by, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, their moral perfectionism and ordinary language philosophy.

Nya möjligheter för stratifieringsforskning i Sverige : Internationella yrkesklassificeringar och stratifieringsmått över tid

New opportunities for social stratification research in Sweden: International occupational classifications and stratification measures over time The Swedish occupational classifications have in recent years been changed to a version of the international standard ISCO-88(COM), i.e. SSYK 96. As a consequence, a wide variety of internationally well-known stratification measures can be applied to Swedish data sets. In this article some tests of the validity of translation keys between the older national classifications and SSYK 96 are presented. The keys seem to work satisfactorily. Thus, it is possible to create long time-series with ISCO/SSYK and use these well-known stratification measures over time. Hence, the international interest in Swedish data sets, and empirical results based on these data sets, could rise. Moreover, in the article an empirical regularity, which is quite astonishing, is paid attention to; stratification measures based on different theoretical rationales indicate very similar hierarchies of occupations.