After searching online and not finding anything, I decided to do my own comparison. I just barely finished it.
http://helenajole.freeservers.com/home/Harry.html
Check out the sorting scene in Ch. 7, and the red-card explanation in Ch. 11.
Helena, thanks for that link, it was very interesting. I have both the American and British versions, but i never noticed there were that many differences!
Lorie
Who’da thunk affirmative action would have hit the Potter books?
Helena, very enlightening. Thanks for making it available.
I would not have believed it! The fact that they had to translate the book into American English for the stupid American kids takes a distinct second place.
A good source for this kind of thinh is http://www.hpgalleries.com - check out the covers gallery!
And bad counting skills too! They added another person but didn’t change the line that says “And now there were only three people left to be sorted.” Whoops!
Is Dean Thomas, the kid described as being black in the sorting scene, black in the movie?
no he’s purple.
Ah.
Please explain to me how not knowing the British terms makes a kid “stupid” ? In America, if someone hands you “jelly” it’s stuff you spread on toast, for example. A “bogey” is an enemy airplane, not a nose goblin. A jumper is like overalls or a kind of dress. There is nothing “stupid” about not being aware of the different meanings that words have in another country. Hell I’m 29 and I’ve been to England twice and I still have to ask what things mean sometimes.
It doesn’t make you stupid, but it’s sad not giving US kids the opportunity to learn a slightly different version of English than American English.
When I was a kid, I read English and American books, eg Enid Blyton, and other ones like Sweet Valley High. It didn’t take long to work out what you guys mean by “jelly” and “pants”. So at least if I ever travelled to the US, I would be wised up to the fact that some things had different names there.
And now, in the Internet Era, it should be even easier for kids on both sides of the Atlantic to quickly ask about things they don’t understand.
Personally, I see Americanising a piece of British English literature as insulting and limiting to a generation of American kids who surely have the intelligence and the curiosity to work out the anomalies for themselves.
I’m annoyed by these changes. As I’ve said before, nobody changed the wording in The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings. The first time I read The Hbiit I had a moment of minor culture shock when Bilbo Baggins “put a thumb behind his Braces and blew a smoke ring”. I couldn’t figure out how he could blow smoke when his thumb was in his mouth. It turns out, of course, that in British English “Braces” are what we call “suspenders”. But that’s part of the joy of books – I learned something from this. The experience of the Hobbit would not have been enhanced by “translating” it into “American” by changing that word to “suspenders”.
I’ve learned a lot about British culture from the English translations of the Asterix books, and from Rupert, and Alice in Wonderland, and the Horatio Hornblower books. “Philosopher’s Stone” carries a lot of fascinating cultural baggage about alchemy and the search for knowledge that “Sorceror’s Stone” simply whitewashes out of existence.
I saw an edition of Hamlet that had the American “translation” on on the opposite page. “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” became “Help!” We don’t need this sort of thing. This doesn not enhance our language or culture.
I agree that it’s sad that they changed it; I just took offense to the labelling of kids as ‘stupid’
In a similar vein, in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy is rocked to sleep in the eye of the cyclone, there’s a line that says “It was the jar that awakened her.” as she lands in Oz. For years (I was maybe 4 when I first read it) I wondered what kind of jar. What was in it? Jelly? Pickles? How did it awaken her? Did it fall off a shelf? Did it roll arond in a cupboard?
Somewhere along the way, I figured out that “jar” was a verb, not a noun, in that sentence.
And I agree. Dumbing down the book and changing the flavor of the prose doesn’t do anyone any good. If there really was a serious concern for the language barrier, and the publishers thought the kids too dumb to ask or do the tiny bit of research (a dictionary), they could have included a glossary which would have been an excellent substitution for butchering the prose.
Having read both versions of the first book, there’s a flavor…a…nuance missing in the American edition. It’s subtle, to be sure: there’s not that much of a difference. But there’s a subtle flavor that’s lost.
On preview, I see Opal’s response. I think rowrrbazzle pretty accurately nailed the publisher’s point of view. It’s not that the kids are stupid, it’s that the publisher thinks they are.
Fenris
I really don’t get the translation thing, especially when the HP books are loaded with new vocabulary anyway. Made-up Quidditch terminology is fine, but words which are actually in use in another culture, and which most Americans will probably hear in real life at some point, are too difficult? It doesn’t make sense.
Kids are like sponges when it comes to language anyway, and I think it’s a great shame that our educational system is structured so that they rarely encounter any material that presents a serious linguistic challenge. This is why so many high school students are afraid of Shakespeare – they’re not used to adapting to new kinds of language, and are therefore uncomfortable with anything they can’t understand at first glance. The popularity of HP suggests it doesn’t have to be that way; in fact, when I was working in a children’s bookstore, I met quite a few American kids who had read both versions of the first two books and liked the British ones better. I’m hoping they still feel that way in a few years.
Fascinating! I’ve always wondered about the differences. I’m American but have always favored British authors—wasn’t aware that some of these spellings/phrases were considered “British” (especially the was/were changes).
Boy–some of those changes are really nitpicky!
2 questions—what the heck is a knickerbocker glory (obviously a dessert w/ice cream, but what else)? And does it seem weird to anyone else that they capitalized the word “black” in reference to Dean’s race? I’ve seen that in books from the seventies or so, but it startled me to see it in a recently published book.
I saw a British edition in one of our local used bookstores and noticed that it was much flimsier than the American versions—paper quality/thickness & the sturdiness of the cover made it look like a cheap trade paperback.
I’m going to go buy the Brit versions now and read them as the author intended them to be read…
That was probably the publishing company, emphasising poor Dean Thomas’s race, so they could say the school was integrated. (as if the Patil family doesn’t give that away-- Dean Thomas isn’t even real and he is being used as a poster child so book editors can feel happy about themselves…) I didn’t pick up that he was black until the second time i read the book, though i caught Angelina Johnson was. And Lee Jordan, they just said he had dreadlocks, so i made him some dirty white boy with blond dreads and nappy hair, until i saw he was black as well. Of course, i believe Cho Chang is asian, but Rowling has not said that explicitly to my knowledge…
There’s really no way to discuss this point without lapsing into easily-refutable generalizations, so here goes: as a rule, British hardcover books are pretty horribly made. As a collector, this is just a given. It really started post-WW2, when times were tight; UK publishers such as Gollancz were known for books that basically fell apart if you looked at 'em funny. Things have gotten somewhat better since the '90’s, but on average, UK hardcovers aren’t the most sturdy books. (please note: many US books don’t fare much better - especially in the '70’s, when publishers were experimenting with “perfect bound” books - this is a technique adapted from soft-cover book construction that has no place in hardback bookmaking - e.g., US books from Doubleday (one of the biggest culprits) were crap.)
It was very inconsistent… I don’t know if they just don’t use the subjunctive in the UK or what, but “was” was only changed to “were” in the US version a few times. Kind of sloppy, if you ask me. Either use it or don’t.
I just saw the movie and was intrigued.
I am completely new to the series, so how do I know if its an American publication or not?
I am here in the states and would rather have the Brittish version. Would it be best to go through amazon.uk?