Chinese Pirates Hawk Potter Translations

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

BEIJING (AP) -- Though it's missing some paragraphs and gets a couple of facts wrong, an unauthorized Chinese version of ''Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince'' was on sale Sunday in Beijing, just two weeks after the book appeared in English and almost three months ahead of the planned October launch of the official Chinese-language edition.

Impatient Chinese fans also have begun posting their own translations online. One reader was so upset about the ending he wrote his own and posted it on a university Web site.

The fantasy series by J.K. Rowling is wildly popular in China, where the hero is known as ''Ha-li Bo-te'' and authorized translations of five earlier books have sold millions of copies. In 2002, an unknown Chinese author produced an entire fake adventure, ''Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-To-Dragon.''

Chinese leaders, under pressure from the United States and the country's other trading partners, have promised repeatedly to stamp out the country's rampant piracy of goods ranging from books and movies to drugs and designer clothes.

But such fakes are still widely available, and foreign companies say they are losing billions of dollars in potential sales.

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