By IANS
Bhopal : There is good news for Hindi speaking Harry Potter fans. The Hindi edition of the sixth instalment of the Harry Potter series, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”, was launched Saturday.
“Breaking the language barrier, the translation is available as ‘Harry Potter aur Half-Blood Prince’ giving the quality and feel of international standards,” said Vikas Rakheja, the managing director of Manjul Publishing House which has been publishing the Indian language editions of the Harry Potter books in India.
“The cover of the Hindi edition is from US-based Warner Bros, which is different from that of that Britain-based Bloomsbury edition available in India.
“While the translation of the fifth part of the series was released in May this year, the translation of the sixth book in the series has been released prior to schedule in view of the heavy demand by Hindi-speaking children,” said Rakheja.
“We have been receiving scores of e-mails, phone calls and letters every day demanding that all the remaining parts be published in Hindi as quickly as possible. The translation of the seventh book is expected to be released by December,” he said, adding that most of the major international language translations will also be out only by December 2007 or January 2008.
Rakheja claimed that the Bhopal-based Manjul Publishing House is the only publication house in the country that has rights to publish the translations of the Harry Potter series in Hindi and a few other Indian languages.
He added that a lot of die-hard Harry Potter fans in India, who have read all the English books in the series, are now looking at making the Hindi editions a part of their collection. There is also considerable interest from collectors internationally, who, though unable to read Hindi, are nonetheless ordering them just for their collection.