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Entry tags:
linguistic puzzlers
I'm reading John Le Carré's latest, A Delicate Truth, and I'm finding a lot of what look like Americanisms in the text. It's bugging me because I don't know if (a) some language was changed for the American edition, (b) it's just that American expressions increasingly creep into British English, or (c) Le Carré is using them deliberately to make points about his characters.
If the text was Americanized by the US publisher, it's been done very inconsistently. On the one hand, "pants" is used in the American sense (Br.Eng. = trousers); on the other, "fairy lights" is left untranslated.
Have I mentioned that I hate it when British books are Americanized by US publishers? I am not a ten-year-old reading Harry Potter; I'm not going to put the book down in frustration if I encounter an unfamiliar phrase.
Does anyone know if US books are Anglicized/Australianized for those markets? Or is US cultural hegemony strong enough that they're left unchanged even though the reverse isn't true?
If the text was Americanized by the US publisher, it's been done very inconsistently. On the one hand, "pants" is used in the American sense (Br.Eng. = trousers); on the other, "fairy lights" is left untranslated.
Have I mentioned that I hate it when British books are Americanized by US publishers? I am not a ten-year-old reading Harry Potter; I'm not going to put the book down in frustration if I encounter an unfamiliar phrase.
Does anyone know if US books are Anglicized/Australianized for those markets? Or is US cultural hegemony strong enough that they're left unchanged even though the reverse isn't true?
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Though I also wonder if the Americanization of books is a new thing. I don't remember hearing about it before the Harry Potter books, and I don't remember the English books I read when I was a teenager being Americanized except perhaps in spelling. Not that I would necessarily have noticed either way, though early exposure to British TV as a young teenager (e.g. the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Monty Python, Brideshead Revisited) exposed me to a lot of initially baffling new vocabulary. (What's a dole queue, Trillian? I'm confused!)