The topic of the thesis is the Dutch translations of character names in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which is a story about how Harry Potter discovers the magical world after spending the first 11 years of his life in the ordinary, non-magical world. The book has been translated by Wiebe Buddingh’. There are altogether 112 characters in the novel, all of which have been included because effort has been made to create and translate each name. The purpose of the study was to investigate the translation of the names into the Dutch language: how they have been translated exactly and how they compare with translations into other languages. The analysis has been conducted through a careful reading of the names. The origin of the target text names was briefly examined and compared with the source text names to discover the method of translation, after which the names were categorised based on what method has been used to translate them. The categories used in this paper are the ones used by Davies (2003), who analysed culture-specific items in the Harry Potter novels. The categories are preservation, addition, omission, globalisation, localisation, transformation and creation. After analysing each name individually, an overview of the translation was formed and the results of the analysis were discussed in the context of each category. The overview also included discussion on the translation in the framework of relevant translation theories introduced in the theoretical background section. Even though I have studied Dutch for some years, I am not yet fluent in it, which is why any problems or difficulties deducting the meaning of the name were solved by consulting a native speaker of Dutch. It was found that preservation was used the most, which is probably due to the closeness of the Dutch and English cultures. Transformation was also quite common and the new names were often linked to the personality of the character or the spelling of the original name. The names were fairly descriptive and unambiguous. ...