Reading Harrius Potter with students

So, I'm in over my head these days, just feeling my way along what I am doing with my Latin 4s, determined, if nothing else, to consider ENJOYING THE LANGUAGE a priority.  Thus this semester we are reading Harrius Potter, chapter 3.  This is the chapter where the letters start arriving.  We are about 5 pages in, and have had some productive days and some not so productive days, which is what happens when you have seniors 7th period.




We have had some good discussions on WHY the translator, Peter Needham, chose the phrasing which he chose.  Today I wrote to a colleague more knowledgeable than I, but in the process discovered a few things.  This is what I wrote to him:

***

Here are a couple of things we noted yesterday and I would be interested on your take:

Page 27, midway down:

Harrius epistulam suam, quae in membrana gravi eiusdem generis ac involucrum scripta est, explicaturus erat, cum repentino motu Avunculi Vernon e manu erepta est.

I know I have not read broadly enough to judge certain things, but I kept feeling that this sentence would have been helped if ILLA had been used in the cum clause (cum ILLA repentino motu...) to indicate that we had changed subjects.  (And since I had taught explicare as "explain" earlier this week to Latin 2, I had to think twice to realize he's using it for "unfold" here.) Is it just not provided because the quae clause has scripta est and it is parallel to that, thus making ILLA unnecessary?

Also on Page 27, but few paragraphs farther down:

Dudley epistulam captabat ut ipse legeret, sed alte sublatam ab Avunculo Vernon non attingere poterat.

In this sentence, Dudley is purposefully kept as the subject throughout, but in the English original it reads:

Dudley tried to grab the letter to read it, but Uncle Vernon held it high out of his reach.

We understand it, of course, but wondered why the translator went to the trouble to keep the focus on Dudley. Then again, occurs to me know that Caesar purposefully kept the same case for an item-- that is, in the case of Pullo and Vorenus, in book 5.44.  Line 13ff

transfigitur scutum PULLONI et verutum in balteo defigitur. Avertit hic casus vaginam et gladium educere CONANTI dextram moratur manum, impeditumque hostes circumsistunt.

So, do you think it's THAT sort of thing that the translator was after?  Except in this case it was EPISTULAM...SUBLATAM.  Huh.  Well, if that IS this case, do you think it was a good choice or maybe over the top in translating a modern story?
***
I have yet to get a reply, but decided to show the letter to my students anyway. One even thanked me (how lovely!). And I told them I think we need to read the seen with Pullo and Vorenus in Caesar before the year is out.

As for the structure of what I'm doing write now... well, in some ways it is too loose for comfort.  Before we begin each day I do make them read aloud with a partner what we read the day before.  And as we are reading through and discussing the day's reading, I keep circling back and rereading the paragraph(s) we are working on.  We've also had some dictation (a "nightmare" that combined elements from Harrius Potter) which worked some vocabulary items a bit.

Anyway.  This was more of a thinking out loud post than anything else.