Great Moments in Translation

6 July 2005, 0215 EDT

Patrick Jackson and Peter Mandaville co-authored a terrific chapter for Iver Neumann’s and my edited book on “Harry Potter and International Relations.”

Okay, you can stop laughing at us now. We all had fun writing the volume and it does, actually, have some academic merit.

Anyway, the point I was going to make is this:

Patrick and Peter have some very interesting things to say about the politics of translation involved in the Harry Potter books, both in the literal sense – how one translates, for example, an English-language book into Arabic – and in the cultural sense- how one localizes a piece of popular culture.

Google, apparently, is not the way to go. As if translating Japanese in the “cultural sense” isn’t hard enough…

Thanks to Sadly, No! for making me laugh today.

Oh, and if anyone has any good title ideas, we’re still looking.

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.