The Pragmatics of Language Variation: Harry Potter in Translation

Abstract

Language variation has been talked about in many linguistics and translation books. Language variation has often been treated in a superficial manner and sometimes ignored, but when it is pragmatically driven, conveying the language variation should not be ignored. The data for this paper is selected from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J. K. Rowling, published in 1997 by Bloomsbury. This paper analyzes language variation in both the source text and target text, English and Arabic, in this case, to find virtues and spot shortcomings in terms of conveying the pragmatic message. The findings indicate that more focus should be put on language variation that is pragmatically driven.