OK in Harry Potter and in translation

Abstract

OK was coined in the US as a jocular initialism, and survived thanks to circumstances, its flexibility of form and possibilities for re-interpretation. Today, OK has grown in frequency, diversified in usage and been naturalised in other languages around the world as a symbol of American culture. This paper defines the deep meaning of OK, then focuses on its 283 occurrences in a purposefully aligned corpus of the seven Harry Potter books and their translations in French and some other European languages; in the translations, the multitude of context-dependent equivalents of OK is most striking, as is the use of meliorative words – sometimes antiphrastically – to signal well-being or agreement in a non-neutral fashion. The data suggest that in English, OK has pushed aside other linguistic markers to occupy a semantic node of its own, i.e. neutral conformity to a standard, and it may be doing the same in other languages, such as Swedish, but cultural factors must be considered, too. Conversely, OK is rare in the French and Spanish translations, possibly owing to the translators’ effort at linguistic purity or the publishers’ guidelines, although it is known to be used in informal speech in these languages.