Fri 17 Oct 2008
Localised English Book Editing
Posted at 16:47 +1100
Justine Larbalestier posted an item on her blog the other day about editors "translating" books from British to American, in effect. The comments are mostly a bunch of people, including me, all in violent agreement that we don't really like the practice, although it's a self-selecting sample of readers enthusiastic enough to follow an author's blog. However, it's interesting to think about the trade-offs being made here.
For those who haven't read the article or grasped the gist of it, a lot of editors, say, in the USA publishing the US version of a book originally written by a British or Australian author will not only drop the "u"s from colour and favourite, but will also convert measurement systems and sometimes change entire words. Harry Potter and the Philospher's Stone changing to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone being one example noted in the comments. This isn't just a British to USA passage, either. There are cases of USA to Australian and vice-versa as well (not to mention New Zealand versions, etc).
Like all(!) the commenters on that post, I agree that the words could probably be left alone and any colloquialisms treated via a glossary. Even changing the spelling (dropping the u's) seems a tad unnecessary and costly in terms of time required to edit and book that might have 75,000 words or more. If readers and users of the English language don't already realise there are at least two predominant versions used in the world, the it's time they learnt that in any case.
More interesting to me, though, was when I was trying to work out if I even notice this in books. I read a lot and a fair mixture of both US, British and Australian editions. I think I do notice stuff like spelling variations and I personally prefer the British versions, although in Australia it feels like it's becoming more an more ambiguous which is the more common spelling. But the tone of a book, which includes the narrators voicing style and words as well as any active characters, is even more important. If you switch from metric to imperial measurements (kilometres, metres and centimetres to miles, feet and inches), it completely changes the character of the narrator. Now they're an American, rather than an Australian, or vice-versa. Even when the narration is done in a way such that there's no explicit narrator character, changing the way the words are written changes our mental image of the story-teller.
My main problem, then, is that the inconsistencies rapidly start to show. You can't make James Bond not be British in action, so why would one give him an American vocabulary (fortunately, I don't think this ever happened to Ian Fleming's books, but that was a different era and different audience to Justine's). Romeo and Juliet wouldn't quite be the same play if all the "Shakespeare" was removed from it. It might well still be a good story, but it wouldn't be what Shakespeare wrote. An obvious example here: compare Taming Of The Shrew, the Shakespeare original, to the film 10 Things I Hate About You, which is a modern remake of the story. A good film plot, but not the same play as Shakespeare's.
Justine herself has written an excellent series (I reviewed it last year) based around three teenage characters, two of whom are Australian and one of whom is from the US. Justine was very clever about writing in an Australian style for the chapters set in Sydney and a US style for the chapters set in New York. Spelling, pacing, visuals... they were all adjusted to the locale the characters were in. It's subtle until you notice it — or see where Justine mentions it in her blog — but it would not survive any effort to "localise" the text to be purely American or purely Australian and the story would suffer.
When cultural localisation happens, when spellings are changed and measurement systems are converted and some words are replaced, the result might still be a good story. But it's not the author's story. It's something kind of like the original and if you're lucky or don't concentrate too hard, you might not be too upset. But the inconsistencies will show up — a New Zealand character using US-only words perhaps — and the book will look poorly edited, rather than more locally-appropriate.
I'm only writing this because it took me a disappointingly long time to work out exactly why I didn't like this practice and why changing "just the spelling" is still hurting things. Intuitively, I knew it made things worse, but I couldn't put my finger on exactly why I thought that. End of the day, I suspect it comes down to the fact that inconsistencies in the storyline, or the vocabulary, or the plotting, drag the reader out of the story and remind you that you're reading a book, not living the adventure. We read a lot of (fiction) books to escape into the story; damaging the illusion kind of spoils the whole point of the exercise.
Food for thought as a final item: this is also done a lot in movies that are remade, particularly by Hollywood. Now, it could be argued that this is because the consumer doesn't have time to consult a glossary or convert measurements, or that audiences "expect" something else. So is it maybe more permissible and/or necessary there? I would still argue that it significantly changes the story, regardless of how it's justified. You can't get too more wildly different horror movies than the original Japanese Ring trilogy of movies and the US remakes of Ring 1 and Ring 2. They both kind of tell the same story, but the Japanese one uses a lot more technique to do so and is certainly not "formulaic".