Harry Potter and the Plentiful Persian Translators

As far as unauthorized translations, this number is unprecedented to say the least. I was shocked by the five Burmese translations of PS, but 17? The most recent, published in 2023, we only discovered in the last couple of days. (Shout out to @aroundtheworld_withharrypotter—thank you!) One of them I already had when this began, Parto Ishraq‘s PS which seems comparatively easy to get in the West, and in all the time I’ve been investigating them, I’ve managed to acquire just one more of them: a translation by Sedigheh Ebrahimi. They are so hard to find! A handful of the 96 have shown up on ebay, but they are few and far between.

About four years ago, I came across an Iranian website called “Gisoom” that sells used books and started on an investigation that has only now come fully to fruition. I have identified fully 96 (!!) unauthorized Farsi/Persian translations of the eleven Harry Potter books I keep track of (Books 1-7, the Hogwarts Library and Cursed Child). Of those, 17 are translations of Philosopher’s Stone. And I have no real confidence that I have found them all. (For the rest of this article, I’m going to make the arbitrary choice to use “Farsi” rather than “Persian”.)

What took so long? Not cataloguing the translations themselves, ironically. Arabic script really was the problem. I’m not intimidating by diving into an unknown writing system and doing my own transliterations; however, the Arabic script is inherently problematic to transliterate because most vowel sounds are not represented. That means you really need to know the language so you can fill in the missing information. I do not speak Farsi I’m afraid.

I had managed to find someone on Reddit to transcribe the Farsi text (titles, names, etc.) that I already had on The List; however, this time I compiled a list of nearly two hundred unique titles and names of translators, publishers, and editors. It’s a lot for someone to take on—and I hadn’t found anyone capable or willing to do so (or whom I was willing to impose upon). Finally—and we’ll see how good of a choice this was—I had ChatGPT do them. I’ve heard of a study that found ChatGPT did a better job of translations in about 10 languages than Google Translate… and the results seemed reasonable to me. They definitely aren’t perfect; I did notice some inconsistencies that I fixed, but not being a native speaker, I’m really limited on how much I can pick up on. If anyone reading this has some insight into the quality, I’d love to hear it!

I am not going to include the full list of 96 books here—it’s just to much to dump in a single post. I will only include the Philosopher’s Stone translations and without as much detail as I ordinarily would include. The details are, of course, all included in the The List, so you can follow the links below. The remaining translations are there as well of course; to check out them all you can click here.

Some of these I don’t have cover images for or only have really poor quality ones. If you can help out with that, I’d be grateful (for any of the translations on The List, not just PS)! And most of them, I don’t have copies of so if you come across any I’d definitely be interested in obtaining them!

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