Prominence in School Stories
The first boarding school story was Sarah Fielding's The Governess: or Little Female Academy, published in 1749. They did not become popular until 1857, with Tom Hughes' novel Tom Brown's School Days. The house system has since featured prominently in thousands of school stories books, with many authors writing a whole series of books such as Chalet School, Mallory Towers, Jennings and Billy Bunter, which have been published around the world and translated into several languages. The Harry Potter books and films (re)popularized this genre, and resulted in unprecedented awareness of British boarding schools (and their house system) in countries where they were previously unknown.
These stories depict the popular conception of a British boarding school rather than how modern boarding schools work in reality, and often focus on the most positive aspects. For example, loyalty to own's house is very important in real life houses, and is featured prominently in many of these books. The Harry Potter books have updated the boarding school to modern values, for example by depicting mixed-sex education houses. Many British people never went to a boarding school, but have integrated their values by reading these books.
The translators of some foreign editions of the Harry Potter books had difficulties translating the "house" concept in languages like Russian, because there was no word that could adequately convey the importance of belonging to a certain house, the loyalty owed to your house, and the pride in the prizes won by your own house. This forces translators to insert extra explanations in the dialogues, making foreign readers think that the house and boarding systems were a special feature of the fantasy setting rather than a real world feature which would not need to be explained to a typical British child. The French translation does not explain the differences between the French and English real-world boarding schools: for example, French houses are not responsible for their own discipline via head girls/boys.
Read more about this topic: House System
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