I know I am probably not the first or last person to make this observation, but love her or hate her, JK Rowling has done one helluva job increasing the English literacy rate throughout much of the industrialized world.
While I can’t give you any hard numbers for the East Asian region (aside from the 11 million as a whole for the latest installment) nearly all of my students bought and devoured the newest book within a week of its commercial availability.
Who cares, right? Well, it has not been translated into Korean yet and as much as I would like to brag about how good their instructors are (we do kick ass), very few are fluent in English.
Yet, whatever linguistic hurdles they face throughout Rowling’s magical hocus-pocus prose, they are every bit the bonified page turner as their Western counterparts.
Paper cuts
During the summer of 2000 I briefly worked as a clerk at a large bookstore chain called Walden Books (the parent company is Borders).
At the time I didn’t think much of it, but my manager - the definition of bibliophile - waxed on and on about how Rowling had single handedly created a generation of children who actually enjoyed reading.
While it may be too early to conduct longitudinal studies on the matter at hand, it does appear that fans enjoy it enough to risk prison time to manually translate it: French police recently arrested a 16-year-old schoolboy for posting his own translation online.
One last note: I wonder as to the kind of stance anti-globalists would have on the issue of cultural education in the form of fictional literature. Or is this somehow another example of Western culture being foisted upon the developing world?