I finished Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince yesterday morning. (I would have finished it Thursday, when I received it, but I’d had a long day and faded at midnight.) I was wondering if there are differences between the UK edition and the U.S. edition? For example, the first book talks of the Philosopher’s Stone in the UK edition, and the U.S. version talks of the Sourcerer’s Stone. A later book says ‘We kept our peckers up’ in the UK version, while the U.S. version says ‘We kept our spirits up’.
I gather from another thread that the U.S. edition does use ‘trainers’ instead of ‘sneakers’. The UK edition uses ‘fug’, which, as mentioned in another thread is either a misprint or a possible mis-use of the word, just as the U.S. edition does. What about snogging? Is it ‘snogging’ in the U.S. version, or is it ‘kissing’ or ‘making out’?
I remember hearing in a radio story during the Book 5 hype that as Rowling has become more successful, she’s been able to avoid “translating” the books for the U.S. market, which she never wanted to do. So now Harry wears trainers, not sneakers. Of course, I did notice in Book 6 that he wore a sweater, not a jumper, so maybe it isn’t perfect.
