Spanish translation for Harry Potter

On Thursday of last week, three different Spanish translations of Harry Potter were released. One translation was bound for Spain, one for Argentina, and one for the other locations in Latin America. It's amazing how a book like Harry Potter can have such a following and that the power of that following can demand three different Spanish translations for different regions of the world. I wonder if the previous Harry Potter books were also translated into slight variations from one another. I have the second and third Harry Potter books in Spanish and they seem to be translated with "Spain" Spanish.

 

On Amazon.com you can't tell which version it is that your buying so it would be interesting to know the distribution of the versions. I imagine that the books sold in the U.S. would be the version sold to the majority of Latin America.

 

On another interesting note about the book, the English title, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" was translated as "Harry Potter y el misterio del príncipe" and did not include the possibly more accurate translation of mestizo due to negative cultural connotations that exist with that word. It shows once more that a translator's job is not to merely render one language into another, but to always take into consideration the culturual implications of the translation.

 

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The Altavista Spanish Translator

There are a ton of free online translator programs. A lot of these translators offer roughly the same options there really doesn't seem to be much difference in the quality of the translations that they produce.

One of the most popular online translators is the Altavista Spanish translator, or Babel Fish. This translator can be found at the Babel Fish site.

Here are some of the features of the Babel Fish translator:
-Provides translations for 36 language pairs
-Can translate a block of text up to 150 words
-Can translate web pages
-Has a World Keyboard for entering accented or Cyrillic characters

In terms of the quality of the translation, it's like I've mentioned on my site, you get what you pay for. It's good for shorter texts when you want a rough idea of what the text says, but for anything official or important, it's best to get help from a qualified translator.

You can also read some reviews about some other popular online translators, as well as see a sample of how they (along with the Altavista Spanish translator) perform at the Spanish-translation-help website.