I think ‘perfectly normal’ is a decent approximation.
Isn’t the original something like: The Dursley family who live at 4 Privet Drive are a perfectly normal family, thank you very much.
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Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
But yeah, I distinctly remember the “thank you very much”. That said, I’m trying to avoid remembering what the English version said as I read it in Japanese, otherwise I start going “yep, I got the gist, moving on”.
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I love how in Japanese they are perfectly capable of saying two things at the same time. But on the other hand, you lose a lot of nuance when reading out loud to your kids for example. How does the audiobook do it, I wonder. Do they just say 常識的, or まとも, or do they choose a different word altogether?
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True, I kind of speed read through it this summer, since I’m so familiar with the story already.
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The Kindle edition does not have the “furikanji” for まとも. It has dots next to it that I believe is equivalent to bold or italic. Interesting!
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The narrator says まとも. And like @mefire206 said, there’s no kanji on the Kindle version for that word.
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Curious. Just in that paragraph, there’s several differences between yours and mine. ダースリ―夫婦 in mine becomes ～夫妻 in yours, mine inserts なこと after 非常識, 魔訶不思議 is written in full kanji (albeit with furigana over the 魔訶), and mine has 自分たち where yours has 彼ら. Plus, more furigana in yours.
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I wonder if there are different translations among the various publications. The Kindle Edition is translated by Yuko Matsuoka and published in 1999.
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Same translator, but 2012 edition.
It’s unsurprising they’d use the same translation - doing it over from scratch is a big task.
Not outside of copy/paste, no.
I’m planning to do the following:
- Read the through the chapter without looking anything up and grasp as much as I can.
- Listen to the chapter on Audible.
- If I have time, read through the chapter again and lookup things as I need to.
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Yeah, it’s the Kindle version so I’d bet those are all editorial revisions that have been added since that particular version came out.
Aye. I’d guess they just have an editor go over it every few years. I’ve seen Kindle push through editorial changes to a few of my other English novels.
According to the copyright, this digital version was published in 2015.
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It makes sense that there would be a few revisions though the years, I just found it surprising that there are that many changes in a single paragraph.
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Ok, does this mean what I think it means (speaking about ダーズリー being a great son):
というのが二人の親バカの意見だった
According to the opinion of these two idiot parents
I went and bought the English version to compare and it’s more circumspect about it. lol
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If you refer to my comment above I actually noticed this phrase too!
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Thanks! 
I didn’t know it was a phrase. I’ve been trying not to look things up but I think I may change up my method.
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I go back and forth, sometimes I look up every word I’m not certain of and other times I just keep going as long as I can figure out the gist. I think both methods are totally fine.
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The trick in spotting it, I reckon, is that there’s no particles, punctuation, or any other sort of grammar between the 親 and the ばか.
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Finished chapter 1 and I have to say it’s pretty good so far. Since the last time I tried to read it my comprehension has gone up very significantly! This book clubs timing was very good for me:
I just got a new Kobo Forma (and this is my first book I’ve read on it), and it’s also the first day of the latest round of the Tadoku contest.
I’m not sure if I’ll read ahead, or keep to the book club pace (either way I’ll come back and read each chapter as the club covers it, and it’s not like I don’t already know the whole story by heart anyway).
The vocabulary and grammar are surprisingly easy for me, at least a lot easier than the two advanced book clubs I’ve been following (Re：ゼロ and 本好き). I think the large amount of reading practice I’ve been doing recently is starting to pay off! Another breakthrough is that I understood several monolingual dictionary definitions on the Kobo built in dictionary. I think of the words I looked up I was able to understand about 8/10 from the J-J dictionary, 1/10 I needed to look up a word in the definition and the last 1/10 I just had to look up in J-E because I didn’t get it.
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Out of curiosity, what is the rough difficulty of this supposed to be? I am interested in trying, but I like to stick around 70/30 - 80/20 comprehension for my reading right now
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Easy enough for eleven-year-olds to read, I’d imagine.
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