Spanish translations of Harry Potter

Earlier this week I finished reading the fifth Harry Potter book in Spanish (Harry Potter y la Orden del Fénix) and today I started reading the sixth (Harry Potter y el misterio del príncipe). One thing I've noticed over the year I've been reading these books is that the translations don't seem particularly consistent from book to book. One difference that stands out in my memory is that the wizarding equivalents of the O-levels and A-levels (OWLs and NEWTs) get different names in different books, but I feel like there have been other differences, like maybe with the translation for the English word “goblin” changing in different books? Little things like that.

Today I did a bit of investigation as to why this is the case, and discovered that indeed, three different translators worked on different books in the series: Alicia Dellepiane Rawson translated book 1, Adolfo Muñoz García handled books 2–4, and books 5–7 were translated by Gemma Rovira Ortega. That probably explains a lot of the discrepancies. But what I also discovered in the process of investigating this is that there isn't one single Spanish translation of each book, but multiple adaptions, primarily three: a Castilian one, a Southern Cone one, and a “rest of Latin America” one. (Then there are also further differences between editions because the different regional adaptions have also been revised over time, with singular words tweaked here and there.) A couple of interesting blog posts on this can be found at:

• Harry Potter and the Many Regional Spanish Translations
• Harry Potter and the Spanish ‘Tykes’

The books I've been reading are distinctly Castilian, with extensive use of vosotros and Spanish (as in, from Spain) slang and colloquial language. (Although on the theme of vosotros, it's been interesting to note when the line of formality seems to be drawn differently between the singular and plural – like when Dolores Umbridge is teaching her DADA class, she addresses the whole class as vosotros, but when responding to a point that Hermione specifically has made, she speaks to her as usted.) This would seem to make perfect sense, because those links indicate that only the Castilian edition is available in digital/ebook form (i.e. the format I have the books in); if you want a Latin American book, you've got to order a hard copy. But what this leaves me curious about now is just how extensive the differences are between the editions – and especially between the Southern Cone and “rest of Latin America” editions.

( Cut just to save a bit of space on your reading pages! )