Interesting

So I saw Harry Potter today.
Before I get to the film, some background. All movies in Russia are dubbed. Actually, from what I hear, all foreign movies in most countries are dubbed, and America and a handful of Western European countries seem to be alone in preferring subtitles, the clearly superior way of consuming this medium. If that doesn't spur your nationalistic pride I'm not sure what will.
Anyway, it has only been since films began to be distributed digitally that the dubbing has even been worth a damn. Before, the local studios basically received a product with the audio tracks already integrated, so in order to keep the sound effects, you had to retain the voice tracks as well. Watch any movie on TV more than a few years old and you get this ridiculous mish-mash. For 1.9 seconds you hear the actor's original voice until the dubbing kicks in and almost drowns it out. Now, for someone who has to concentrate to understand the dubbed language and who fully understands the native language, this makes the movie watching experience something akin to watching those war sequences in Saving Private Ryan. (You can talk as much as you like about it conveying to the viewer the confusion, brutality and senselessness of war; I call it shaking the camera around really fast: A technique my dog Max could surpass with a camera tied to his back, thanks to the mollifying quality of his canine corpulence). Anyway, Harry Potter was rather well dubbed, so three cheers for the digital revolution.

Secondly, I noticed that Voldemort's name in Russian is Volandamort. The first two or three times that He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named was... well... named, I thought I misheard. But then, I got it. Voldemort, to our Anglophone ears, is a very sinister sounding name: partly from the deep, round, o sounds; partly from the Latinate influence (from mors, mortis meaning 'death'). But Russians don't have the same associations that we do (whether conscious or not). So, the question is, how does a Russian translator make the name sound sinister to the popular Russian imagination?

Volandamort.

Thirty-two brownie points to the person who guesses why.