Harry Potter, The Chinese Version with the Lens of Linguistics

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the first book of the series, was published in 1997, which was the same year that, thanks to my mom, I was born into this non-wizarding world. I didn’t read the book until about ten years later, when I knew enough words. I was always daydreaming that I would be in Gryffindor House, and become a kind, brave, and upright wizard, just like the Golden Trio. However, having experienced all the random stuff such as Chinese and Western zodiac signs and MBTI, I began to suspect that a better fit for me would be the seemingly negligible Hufflepuff. Not to my surprise, I took the Sorting test on the Wizarding World website in the second decade of the 21st century, and proudly found that I was indeed a Hufflepuff.

My self-awareness and my understanding of the world have been changing over these years. When I take another look into these books, the meaning of certain words also seems to have changed. It is such a bittersweet coincidence that this echoes the essay prompt of the College Entrance Exam in 2026, the year I’m writing this introduction. Since my English has improved a lot, I can now refer to the original English series to see where these shifts come from. Are they from my evolving understanding of everything in the world, or were they simply from the translation don about twenty years ago? And so this column came to be. Let’s use the Time-Turner and go back to the day we first opened Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. But be careful, and don’t let our past selves detect any trace of us from the present.