In fact, it’s worse than you’d realised: British Honduras was renamed as Belize eight years before it gained independence! 
Blimey, her dictionary must’ve been really old to predate the word “aegis”! Heh.
Ah, that’s cleared it up. She wasn’t even slightly right by accident, lord alone knows what her mental picture was during that crossing.
However, a passenger carrying bouncing frog? now that is cross channel craft I’d like to see 
well, A hovercraft of course…
Thanks for fighting my ignorance, much appreciated (and to Ace309 who got there before you!) 
I agree that there are cases where you might want to change one English vernacular term for another, but I think those cases are all, without exception, non-fiction writing.
When it comes to creative writing, I think there is nothing worse than a publisher who presupposes what the local audience might and might not understand and change the author’s words for that reason.
Even reading translated works - novels/poems etc that have been translated from one language to another is bad enough - I struggle through it when I have to because I only have one native language, but there is a constant nagging doubt in my head that I’m not getting the full story. I hate that, even if I enjoy the book in the end, the struggle to get through a translation is a bit tiresome.
But when a book is written in English (whatever variation thereof) I most certainly want to read it as the author wrote it, word for word. I would not buy a book if I knew it had been ‘modified to suit the local audience’. Why? Because I have the facilities to decode whatever is happening on the page. It may take me a while, or I might have to rely on someone else to tell me, or I might not ever really get it - but I have the facilities to do so. ‘What the fuck’ moments are one of the reasons that I read novels.
Tying this all back to the beginning, today I learned that ‘robots’ can mean ‘traffic lights/signals’ in South Africa because I had a ‘what the fuck’ moment and asked about it. It wasn’t entirely comfortable for me because it exposed my lack of knowledge, but, at the end of the day, I’m less ignorant for it.
Does that make sense?
my guess was “Aviation.”
Makes sense to me: I’d blow a couple of gaskets if someone offered me some García Márquez, Mastretta, Llorca or Borges “adapted to Castillian”; many people in Spain and quite a few of my Latin American acquaintances think it’s a bit silly (but hey, it means more jobs) to have several different dubbings to Spanish. The vultures from Disney’s Jungle Book have very different and distinctive accents in the single Spanish-language version: that characterization would be impossible now. I learned how to say “vulture” in Mexican from a Disney movie and I promise it didn’t traumatize me and make me need years of therapy (zopilote, in Spain it’s buitre).
I completely agree that publishers should not do this sort of thing off their own bat; it’s something that should involve the original author.
It does, but I’ll repeat my earlier point that the reader may not have a Wtf? moment. Of course it may then be a fair argument that the sort of contexts in which this would happen are inconsequential; does it really matter, for instance, that readers on either side of the Atlantic will read and understand something different from a description of a field of “corn”?
But I hope I’ve demonstrated that there is at least a reasonable argument to be made that some changes may need to be considered in certain circumstances. Context is everything in this.
There’s two arguments I can make with regard to translating out regional variation when presenting a work to people who speak the ‘same’ language as the author.
First, “Braw, bricht, muinlicht nicht.”
Second, how far should we take it? For example, the soda/pop/tonic/coke regionalism has been mentioned in passing already, and I can add to that fountain/bubbler, faucet/spigot, firefly/lightning bug, and teetertotter/see-saw/dandle.
Also, as a related anecdote, I’ll bring up the issue of things that simply don’t exist outside of some regions: My grandmother was traveling through the South when she saw grits on a menu. She, being the Montanan she was and is, asked a waitress what grits were. The waitress, obviously amazed that anyone could reach the age of reason without knowing about essential staple foods, said “Well, honey, grits is grits!”
I’m still not clear on what “fairy cake” is. This is very unsettling. Thanks a lot, Douglas Adams! 
(In my brain, it’s either a cupcake or angel food cake. Either one works for the story, so I haven’t investigated further.)
or “Aerodeslizador” (esta lleno de anguilas).
You might get more information of how hovercraft “bounce” by looking under “Anguilas”.
Well, I’ve never really understood what “angel food cake” was. In my case, though, I can’t remember which author to blame! 
Curse you (and Ludovic) for getting to this joke just before I did. My nipples explode with delight at you both.
And yes, “fairy cake” is basically angel food cake - a soft white sweet cake.
An angel food cakeis basically a cake that uses egg whites as its leavening agent. It’s very spongy, has a strong vanilla flavor, and is generally made in a tube pan.
You must have been in school from 1823-1840, when Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica were provinces of the Federal Republic of Central America.
There are common uses in which “North America” refers solely to the United States and Canada, especially in cultural, political, and economic contexts.
Just wondering: do you pronounce the first “d” in Wednesday? And while this isn’t universal, a great many people say “cloze” for “clothes”. Interesting is often altered to “in-tress-ting”. I could go on, but I won’t. Everyone has some pronunciations that are non-standard*
- BTW, which “standard”? You mentioned “The King’s English”. If you’re in the US, I find that hilarious; even “proper” American English fails to match that standard!
It’s not standard English, but it’s definitely not lazy.
At one point, acsian was the preferred form in literature over ascian.
“I axe, why the fyfte man Was nought housbond to the Samaritan?” – Geoffrey Chaucer
Chaucer is a good example of how annotating or translating (middle) English works into (modern) English often can be useful, for most people reading Chaucer in the original would have a very hard time following it.
Which brings us to why my grade one teacher was sacked. She demoted me from first grade to kindergarten because she did not like the way I spelled my surname: the way my family had been spelling our surname since the very outset of middle English. Unfortunately, the teacher was not aware of the great vowel shift, which would have my name spelled differently today than it actually is spelled and has been spelled for many centuries. The result? She was fired, I was returned to first grade, and I still spell my name the way my ancestors spelled our name.
When etv78 puts forward that works of English authors should be edited and re-spelled for Americans, I think that etv is making short shrift of the English language(s) and English culture(s). Yes, at some point there usually needs to be annotation (middle English), and at some point there usually needs to be translation (old English), but to suggest that spelling variants in modern English should be edited out for Americans is no more than the perpetuating of cultural ignorance.
And Guanacaste, whose inhabitants joined Costa Rica of their own free will in 1824.
Was Guanacaste a separate province? I thought it was part of Nicaragua before it was transferred to Costa Rica.