Harry Potter and the Ambiguous Adhikari

There is an authorized Nepali translation of Philosopher’s Stone translated by Shlesha Thapaliya and Bijaya Adhikari (HP1-NPI-iii-Tr1). There are also unauthorized translations of the first three books done by G. B. Adhikari (HP1-NPI-iv, HP2-NPI-i, HP3-NPI-ii).

Same last name, and “Bijaya” vs. “G. B.”… that seemed like too much of a coincidence to me and I have long assumed that they the unauthorized translation was a a precursor to the authorized translation—that when Sunbird decided to publish the authorized translation they started with Adhikari’s text, and had them work with Thapaliya to produce the authorized translation.

Despite believing it was a precursor, I left them categorized as separate translations in the list because Sunbird’s publication clearly credited Thapaliya and Adhikari as translators not editor and translator or something else ambiguous, and I tend to take publisher’s information at face-value unless there is good reason not to.

Recently, I have come to question to this belief; I had the opportunity to ask a native speaker’s opinion and his gut reaction was that they were not the same person. Having learned more about Sunbird and Shlesha Thapaliya, it further seemed unlikely that the the authorized translation was at all related to the unauthorized. Finally, I did a comparison of the text at the beginning of Chapter 1—something that has been on my to-do list for a long time—and it seems pretty clear that the translations are not related in anyway.

Consequently, my opinion on Nepali has changed and in particular, I no longer believe that Bijaya Adhikari and G. B. Adhikari are the same person.