Twain called Harris the master at transcribing Negro Dialect. I find his books impenetrable and exhausting to read – but I’m doing it silently. Even read aloud, reading Harris is like trying to run through molasses.
The thing that took me the longest to figure out when reading something in British Engish was that WC was an acronym for Water Closet which meant toliet.
You mean it doesn’t really stand for “Wayside Chapel”?
I think that changing the dialect of a work changes its very nature. OK, so translations due to language are necessary - we don’t all speak Hebrew or Russian - but those are translations of necessity.
If you’re just changing the dialect, why stop at books? Should we in Britain start dubbing or subtitling all American TV? No, of course not - we’re intelligent human beings. Should we start “translating” Shakespeare and Chaucer? No. That would ruin it.
At the point where we’re basically “dubbing” a book, I think they may as well just go for a remake. Set Harry Potter in a high school in an LA suburb and give Voldemort gold fillings or something.
[Chekhov]Absolutely we should translate Chaucer[/Chekhov]
There’s no way I would’ve ground my way through Chaucer in the original (which I did on my own). You can bulldoze your way through his older English if you want – i want to read him without having to puzzle out each and every word.
I agree that Shakespeare ought to be left alone. But I really do appreciate when people modernize Malory or Hobbes.
Yes, but you’re acutely aware you’re reading a “*translation *of Chaucer”. And that you’re be missing aspects of it in consequence. It’s not like Chaucer is marketed to you as the American English version being Chaucer.
Although - I read the original Chaucer at school. Honestly, after a while it becomes easier; you just get into the swing of it and soon stop thinking about it. And that’s a billion times harder than having to struggle with the mental challenge that “colour” instead of “color” presents.
If folks are confused by an extra “u” in this day and age, perhaps they should just give up on this reading lark and go watch MTV instead. I’m sure Beyonce has something poignant to say about liking it and putting rings on it or something. Really, how dumb do you have to be to have “colour” be an issue?
And I don’t even think it would be an issue to American readers. I think publishers think their audiences are dumber than they actually are. I reckon that everybody would enjoy the books exactly as much, and nobody would be stymied by the different spellings which crop up occasionally. It’s incredibly patronising to think that an occasional “u” or an “s” instead of a “z” is going to break someone’s brain.
Do they translate “Huckleberry Finn” as well? That’s ahrdly contemporary American English. Do they produce different versions for American southerners with “y’all” instead of “everybody”? Are these things really difficult for people?
I love reading Lee Child’s books about Jack Reacher (the hero in the books is a former Army MP who travels around the US) if they are published by a British publisher, Jack is alway kicking someone to the kerb:).
Yea, I pronounce it “cuont”.
When I read it the first time (in an American edition, and without knowledge of the change), when I got to the part about halfway through where they’re finally explaining what the Sorcerer’s Stone is, I literally exclaimed out loud “Why didn’t they just call it the Philosopher’s Stone in the first place?”. I mean, OK, some readers won’t know in advance what the Philosopher’s Stone is, but absolutely nobody would know in advance what the Sorcerer’s Stone is. How is that an improvement?
Because Scholastic, being morons, decided that Americans were more likely to know the term “sorcerer” than “philosopher.” More letters, don’tyaknow, plus the dual ph graphemes are all scary.
It apparently breaks brains to leave out U as well. I remember when the movie Pearl Harbor came out someone on a board I frequented at the time refused to call it anything but “Pearl Harbour”.
Oh come on, the books are primarily aimed at kids, and as one who was a kid once, I can attest that I knew more of “sorcerers” than I did “philosophers.” This really has nothing to do with being American, except of the youth variety.
I would only change things that were, like biscuits, something that would give young readers a different image. (Actually I’d probably keep biscuits but perhaps have a footnote or afterward that tells them.) Dialect is one of my favorite parts of any novel.
Something I learned from HARRY POTTER was a British grammatical convention that is different from Americans. Hard to think of an example off of the top of my head but it’s something like this:
If somebody asks me “are you going to the movies later” and I was thinking about it but answer “I might”, whereas apparently in the UK it’s more likely answered “I might do” or “I might will”. Does anybody know what I’m referring to with this? They add a verb to the sentence where in U.S. English vernacular it’d probably not be there.
I think not. The point of communication is to communicate accurately; Americans know exactly what those words mean without re-spelling them. Changing the spelling also possibly changes the point of view and feel of the work, which is a disservice.
So why were British kids allowed to read “philosopher”?
I do not think any British person (or any other native English speaker), would ever say “I might will”. There are some contexts, however, where it would not be unidiomatic to say “I might do”. It is a little more emphatic than just “I might,” and often carries the unspoken implication “but I probably will not”. (Are you sure this is never done in American English too?)
Except that Rowling called the title McGuffin the philosopher’s stone in reference to a concept that far predates her work. Changing the name to sorceror’s stone is a pointless and insulting dumbing down. It’s as if Scholastic changed all mentions of centaurs to horse-men.
In these parts, I hear (and say) “I might could,” which is a little different, but similar idea. (I’d say it connotes, “I think I would like to, and probably will if able, when the time comes.”)
‘I might will’ would stand out as hideously ungrammatical. ‘I might do’ and ‘I might’ would be used interchangeably. Maybe they just weren’t good off-the-top-of-your-head examples of what you were thinking of?
I think the change wasn’t down to thinking that American schoolkids wouldn’t understand the word philosopher, but that it would make the book sound high-brow or intellectual or something. Perhaps they would have liked to make the same change in the British version, but something stopped them. In any case, you’re right - the ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ is too important in itself to be changed just like that; it would’ve been better to change the whole title.
You have to be careful with some words. As a child, I was very confused about how American girls could slide down a hill on their fannies.