UK vs. US

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 170565

colebiancardi wrote:
> 
> 1997 was not the dark ages in the US with the 'net.  I program for
the web, and have done so since 1994.  There were other search engines
besides google in the olden days, not to mention (OMG) real, books
called dictionaries.
> 
> at any rate, if one reads the book, you know what a philosopher's
stone is and most people, including children, look at the cover art
(magical) and read the back of the cover to get the general idea of
what the book is about.
> 
> again, the publishers messed it up. 

Carol responds:
If you're only talking about changing the title, I'd agree with you.
But if you mean Americanizing the text of the books to some degree, I
don't think that the publishers messed up, but of course it's just my
own opinion. Even with many of the terms Americanized, I notice the
remaining Briticisms as I read. Sometimes, they just make the books
feel British, which is great ("git" and "prat" and "mate" and
"horrible great fang" and "pudding" instead of "dessert," for
example), but other times, they're distracting (Urgh! Spotted dick!
What's that? Not that such a term could be "translated" since there's
no equivalent, but it does jump out at me every time I read it, as do
some of Ron's less intelligible slang expressions). I'm not going to
stop reading, at least on a first read-through, to look something up,
nor do I think most child readers would do so. (At most, they'd ask
the nearest adult what the term means.) And dictionaries don't
generally translate British English to American English; you need a
special dictionary (many of which are now online, but *I* couldn't
have found them in 1997 because I didn't start using the Internet
until 1998) to "translate" them. BTW, my favorite British-to-American
online dictionary, a humorous one, can be found at
http://english2american.com/

At any rate, all publishers have style manuals that copyeditors have
to follow, specifying things like punctuation, spelling, hyphenation,
capitalization, and when to spell out numbers. (The best-known and
most commonly used American style manual is the 900-plus-page "Chicago
Manual of Style.") American publishers generally require copyeditors
to Americanize punctuation and spelling (no so-called inverted commas
instead of double quotes; no "u" in "color" or "behavior," etc.) And,
generally, when a term would be misunderstood by many readers, even
adults, it's changed to an American equivalent. (Even some editions of
classics like the Austen or Dickens novels Americanize the
punctuation, as do the Norton Anthologies of English Literature, for
the sake of readability.) 

In a previously unpublished manuscript written by a British author for
American readers, we (copyeditors) would Americanize the spelling and
punctuation and change the wording if and only if it might be
misleading or otherwise interfere with readability. We would leave,
say, "turn about" rather than changing it to "turn around" because
there's no ambiguity, or "petrol" and "lorry" rather than changing
them to "gasoline" and "truck" because they're reasonable familiar to
American readers. I'm not sure about a kids' book, though. I think
that most copyeditors would change those last two, just as "jumper"
was changed to "sweater," so the kids won't be confused. I agree that
"philosopher's stone" should not have been changed (How many British
kids under twelve or so were deterred from reading it by the title yet
didn't know what it meant any more than American kids of the same age
do? Probably not many. I know of *adults* who were deterred from
reading *GoF* by the length, but that's another matter--and their
loss.) Changing "Mum" to "Mom" (or "Mummy" to "Mommy" for Ginny) was
another bad change, which fortunately, occurred only in "Sorcerer's
Stone." OTOH, no American copyeditor would leave something like "knock
up" in a children's book because it means "impregnate" in American
English--not at all what a British author would have intended. (I'm
not sure whether JKR uses that expression; it's just an example of
what needs to be changed, IMO.)

At any rate, publisher have their policies, which copyeditors have no
choice but to follow, and there's a reason for those policies
(readability and anticipated p-r-o-f-i-t-s). They want to be sure that
a book will appeal to its intended audience, and the intended audience
for SS/PS is explicitly stated by JKR in her query letter to
prospective publishers and agents as being nine-to-twelve-year-olds.

Carol, who sometimes wishes that the American editions included a glossary