Well maybe they aren’t as far ahead as they like to think and should stick to something easier.
And not anything written prior to 1970, might be confusing dated slang in there. Or anything with any fantasy element, they might have words that are completely made-up! In fact, nothing with any new concepts or situations that they might not be fully familiar with, they would be incredibly frustrating.
Heaven forbide that the reader should either be challenged or have any novel experiences foisted on them.
For a child or any learning reader, any and every new book or story presents the possibility of unfamiliar words or familiar words used in unfamiliar ways. It’s arbitrary to draw lines at American dialect or British dialect or whatever. It doesn’t make any difference to the reader. Indeed, presenting a child with such challenges will make him or her more flexible and foster an ability to learn.
Around here trainers are shoes or guys at the gym that work you to death, I doubt very much that any child would assume that they were wearing them.
I am for leaving the original words in if only because changing them smacks of censorship to me. The “peckers” thing though, I gotta admit I am at two minds about that one. It really does change the context thinkin that pecker equals penis.
I think the issue is context. People keep saying American kids need to learn. And that is fine, but if the story doesn’t elaborate and only expects the reader to know what they are talking about, it is difficult to learn.
If Harry: “Used his rubber to erase a mistake he had made with his pencil.” This is fine. Any child who thought a rubber meant a condom has the context pointed out, and he can figure this out or ask someone.
If Harry: “Made his way in the darkness by the light of his torch>” the text here doesn’t help. American children would have no reason to learn a slang term here, because to them, a torch is in fact an item that gives light…sadly they will be thinking of the wrong item. This isn’t slang, it is actually a language difference, but the words exist in both languages and happen to do similar things.
If Harry: “Put his mail in thge pillerbox” this is fine, a child reading will be able to figure this out and learn a new word.
Now, to the people that ask why it should be translated, and why things coming from America to other places aren’t. Simple. Non-American children are generally forced to understand other cultures. Their individual countries don’t have enough pull to sway the world, and often they are surrounded or in close proximity to other lands, so learning to deal with them helps them in life.
In America, a person can go his whole life and never hear a british person other than Hugh Grant speak, and products are dumbed down for us because our market is so important that it behooves businesses to do so. That is the reality of it. American’s are spoiled in that respect.
Mind you, I would love to get the British copies, as I didn’t realize they changed text (aside from the title of the first book). I love British slang, and have since I watched Danger Mouse.
When I first started reading this thread, I was of the opinion that altering the dialect would broaden the appreciation. And perhaps that argument does have some merit. But the more I think about it, the more I feel that “Americanizing” the Potter books is essentially admitting that American kids can’t cope with foreign cultures. In other words, dumbing it down. We routinely cram our culture down the throats of kids from every other nation. It’s high time we swallowed some of our own medicine.
I do like N9IWP’s suggestion. If you’re going to have an “American” edition, just pepper it with some footnotes to clear up the usage. An edition of Sherlock Holmes that I once checked out of the library placed extensive notes in the margins to explain unfamiliar terms, and even had illustrations. I thought it was a great help.
Now there’s a project for the true Potterhead: an “unexpurgated” edition. The original text, with in-margin explanations of the more colloquial “Britishisms”, glosses of the mythological references, etc. All in a nice, tome-sized leatherbound edition. Sign me up!
Are you actively trying to miss the point here? The UK is much closer to more non-english speaking countries than the US is, hands down. Is that something you dispute?
I was more referring to culters in general. British Children are in close proximity and deal with French, German, Dutch, etc cultures. So, the mindset of learning and dealing with other cultures is already there.
I find it quite amazing that Canadians, the vast majority of whom use the American versions of the words in question and have never used the English versions - “Pecker,” “sweater,” “torch,” etc - all seemed to understand Harry Potter in its original form just fine. IMHO, the Canadian experience shoots down the entire “American kids won’t understand it” theory. To us, a pecker is what hangs out of your pants when you’re peeing, and yet they published the original versions here and we got along just dandy.
Kds have been reading British children’s books for a hundred years.
**Munch,[/N] no offense, but I find your claim that kids will find the books “frustrating” because one word out of every thousand is a regionalism to be utterly preposterous. My little neice understood it just fine.
Last time I looked, the US was attached to a non-English speaking country and the UK wasn’t.
I doubt that a few unfamiliar words pose much of a problem for most American children, and even if they do, it’s a problem better encountered and overcome sooner than later. (Shoot, I was reading James Herriot when I was seven – an experience which unexpectedly came in handy years later, when I had to take dictation from a succession of Yorkshire-speaking temp bosses.) On the other hand, there are a few isolated instances, such as the aforementioned “keep our peckers up,” where the odd bit of Americanization is a very, very good idea – I just think it should be done sparingly, and with good reason.
What I did say was that children reading far out of their reading age group find words and phrases like that frustrating, using my experience as an example (not a rule). And that was just in the short term. I most definitely said that in the long run, encountering strange words, or common words in strange contexts is a good thing.
Gotta cite? I’d love to see evidence that Canadian children are capable of gleaning the definition of “pecker”, when they’ve never heard it referred to in a sense other than “penis”. Seriously, and without being snarky about it, I really would.
Are you seriously saying that there is no way that a child could judge or at least gloss over the meaning of “Keep your pecker up” in context? I certainly did, even though I knew only the “penis” meaning myself. At the most, the child will be amused. At the worst, it’s not going to be a literary train wreck that will ruin the reading experience, especially with a book like Harry Potter, which has plenty of enchanting detail and action.
Actually, this isn’t necessarily true. The publishing house where I work frequently has books picked up by British publishers. And they do change the texts, sometimes because a word is unfamiliar, sometimes just because it’s different from what British kids are used to.
It’s true that it’s more common for books to be Americanized than Anglicized, but I think this has more to do with economics than publishers’ views of the relative intelligence or laziness of British and American children. An American publisher will print several thousand copies of a book, an English publisher often only a few hundred. It’s simply too expensive to make changes in the text for so small a print run.
It’s sometimes part of my job to Americanize novels. And it does make me sad, because it seems less satisfying than having the novel exactly as the author wrote it. However sometimes, especially in teen novels with a lot of slang, I reach a point where I have no idea what people are saying. The slang can be thick enough that I can lose track of what’s going on altogether. If I have to call up the British publisher or spend half an hour researching just to figure what’s going on in an ordinary conversation, it does seem to make sense to clarify it a little. But we honestly do try to change things as little as possible. (Incidentally, the author does get a chance to approve changes.)
One thing to consider is that books written for reluctant readers are the ones most likely to have a lot of slang in them–in the hope that kids might be more likely to try a book and to stick with it if it sounds familiar. But once you send such a book across the ocean, these kids who don’t read much are probably the ones least likely to persist with a book full of pages and pages of conversation that doesn’t seem to make sense and requires a lot of work to decipher.
The Harry Potter books are being read by lots of kids who normally don’t enjoy reading. It’s great to challenge them with words and concepts outside their usual sphere, but isn’t it worth sacrificing a little authenticity to make sure they aren’t pushed past their frustration level by too much that’s incomprehensible?
Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? I find it a preposterous suggestion that had no changes been made, especially in a fantasy book like Harry Potter, that a significant number (if any at all) of children would have been “pushed past their frustration level by too much that’s incomprehensible.”
If you say that there are some British books that are so heavily slang-laden that they’re incomprehensible, I’ll have to take your word for it, but I found nothing in Harry Potter that was even remotely incomprehensible, no different from when I was a small child and reading Enid Blyton stories. Sure, I had no idea what “ginger beer” was, but it didn’t bother me and it certainly didn’t train-wreck my reading experience.
Last time I looked, the US was attached to a non-English speaking country and the UK wasn’t.