The boy apparently couldn't wait for the French version, so he decided to translate all 784 pages himself.
According to Le Parisien, Rowling alerted her French publishers, Gallimard, to the unofficial version. Police were "particularly surprised" by its quality, which they said was "semi-professional".
The teenager could face charges for violating intellectual property rights.
But Frank Zhang, a lawyer at the Beijing office of the New York-based firm LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene and MacRae, said the Chinese boys and girls who translated the book and pasted the translations online were not violating any copyright law if they didn't do it for profit. It is the websites that will shoulder legal responsibility if they make revenues by using the translations, he said.
