Lia Wyler

Works

Lia Wyler has been translating books since 1969. Her translations include books by English-language authors such as Henry Miller, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, Gore Vidal, Tom Wolfe, Sylvia Plath, Stephen King, and many others.

However, it is as the translator of the Harry Potter series that she has become most well-known. She has been praised by the series author, J.K. Rowling, for daring to take on the challenging task of translating personal names to Portuguese. "Bob Odgen," for example, in the sixth book, became "Beto Odgen": "Bob" is a nickname for the English name "Robert," which has the Portuguese equivalent of "Roberto," for which "Beto" is a nickname.

Some typically Brazilian slang terms were also incorporated into the translation: "Crookshanks" (literally "bent legs") became Bichento (a word which means "twisted legs" in the Brazilian Northeast). She also created original versions of names created by the author, such as "Quadribol," (Quidditch), "Trouxas" (Muggles), and the names of the four houses of Hogwarts: "Sonserina", "Grifinória", "Lufa-lufa" e "Corvinal" (Slytherin, Gryffindor, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw).

Lia graduated with a degree in Literature at PUC-Rio and received her Masters in Communications at Eco-UFRJ, where her thesis was entitled "Translation in Brazil." She was also the author of the first history of translation in Brazil, "Línguas, poetas e bacharéis", ("Languages, Poets, and Scholars" (?) ), and she was the president of the National Union of Translators from 1991 to 1993.

Wyler recently released the translation of the seventh book in the series (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) with the Brazilian Portuguese title Harry Potter e as Relíquias da Morte. Wyler's translations of the book series have been widely considered by fans as inaccurate to the source material.