Strategies Used for Borrowing Neologisms from Harry Potter Movies to Chinese

Abstract

The story of a young student of wizardry Harry Potter is still famous all over the world even though the first book was published more than 20 years ago. The author of this heptalogy J. K. Rowling made up a whole new world full of spells, potions and magical creatures. When creating new words, she proved her talent for creating various puns. These expressions became a major challenge for translators of various languages, including Chinese. This study presents the results of a lexicological analysis of the neologisms that occurred in Harry Potter films. The main aim of the analysis was to determine which loanword categories were used for borrowing every single neologism from English to Chinese and which category was the most productive one within various groups of neologisms and within the whole corpus.

Keywords

• loanwords
• borrowings
• Chinese
• Harry Potter
• lexicology
• translation