Lia Wyler

Lia Wyler was born in Ourinhos, in the State of São Paulo. She translated 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.[1]

However, it was as translator of the Harry Potter series that she became most well-known.[2] 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 died on December 11, 2018, in Rio de Janeiro.[3]