Harry Potter in translation

The Harry Potter series of fantasy novels by J. K. Rowling have become some of the most widely read works of children's literature in history, with readers of all ages and in many countries. In April 2011 worldwide sales of Harry Potter books were estimated to be about 450 million copies,. Oddly enough, it has been difficult to accurately determine with any degree of certainty exactly how many languages Harry Potter has been translated into. As best as can be determined (as of 2017), The Philosopher's Stone has been officially translated from the original English into 74 other languages, the most recent being, Scots, which was released on 2017-11-23. Both Bloomsbury's and J.K. Rowling's sites have recently stated that the books have been translated into 79 languages (their count would now likely be 81 with the subsequent 2017-11-23 release of Scots and the 2017-11-25 release of a new Mongolian translation); however, it has been argued that number actually represents the number of authorized translations (of The Philosopher's Stone) plus the original English. The number of authorized translations is not equal to the number of languages because there have been multiple authorized translations into the same language. Specifically, there have been two separate translations into each of: Mandarin Chinese, Mongolian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian and Turkish (6 languages). English is often included in the list of translations even though technically it should not be (indeed, it is why our list here counts up to 75). Thus: 81 − 1 English − 6 double-translations = 74. It is also worthwhile to emphasize that not all seven books are have been translated into these 74 languages.

The 81 total does not include other linguistically interesting language editions: there have been many regional adaptations of the books to accommodate regional dialects, for example the American English edition or the Valencian adaptation of Catalan. There have been transliterations of translations into different scripts (English Braille, Serbian Cyrillic), there have been major revisions of the Spanish and Italian translations and there have been any number of unauthorized translations.

The focus here is on the languages in which there have been authorized translations (plus the original English). Thus, while there may be incidental note of additional authorized or unauthorized translations, adaptations, transliterations or variants it should not be considered an authoritative source of information about these extra editions.

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