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Chinese Potter pirates make merry

An unauthorised rush translation of the "Half Blood Prince" hits the market in Beijing

FORBIDDEN PLEASURE: A man holds up Chinese and English paperback copies of "Harry Potter and the Half- Blood Prince" in Beijing on Sunday. _ PHOTO: AP

BEIJING: It is missing some paragraphs and gets a couple of facts wrong, but the wizards of China's thriving product piracy industry have worked their magic again and produced a rush translation of the latest Harry Potter book.

An unauthorised Chinese version of "Harry Potter: The Half Blood Prince" was on sale in Beijing on Sunday just two weeks after the book appeared in English and well ahead of the planned October launch of the Chinese-language edition.

Impatient Chinese fans also have begun posting their own translations online. The fantasy series by J.K. Rowling is wildly popular in China, where the hero is known as "Ha-li Bo-te" and authorised translations of five earlier books have sold millions of copies. In 2002, an unknown Chinese author produced an entire fake adventure, "Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-To-Dragon."

A Chinese-character soft-cover version of "The Half Blood Prince," was being sold off a tarp in an underpass in downtown Beijing for 20 yuan ($2.5 ).

The official English-language hardcover books sell in Beijing for 178 yuan ($21) .

The fake book looked identical to the first five "Ha-li Bo-te" tales put out by People's Literature Publishing House, the mainland company that purchased the rights to publish Harry Potter in Chinese.

However, several crucial pages of action are missing and there are some critical mistranslations, such as using the word "immortal" at one point when the original says "mortal."

The earlier authorised translations were produced by a team of veteran children's book translators. Pirated versions of those books and the movie spin-offs are widely available in China.

Chinese leaders, under pressure from the U.S. and the country's other trading partners, have promised repeatedly to stamp out the country's rampant piracy of goods. The People's Literature Publishing House plans to launch the official Chinese version of "Half Blood Prince" on October 15, the Beijing Daily Messenger newspaper reported on Sunday.

AP

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