Most anglophone readers aren't keen on books in translation, a fact borne out by the statistics: Of all books translated into another language, 50 per cent are translated from English, and only 3 per cent into English.
It's interesting, then, that many of the novels in English that we read are actually “translated” for different English-speaking audiences. The practice has been common for decades, ranging from the simple changing of a few spellings – colour/color being an obvious one – to significant sections of rewriting, or even cutting a section that won't work in a particular country. What does it say about us as a reading culture that we need our books adapted like this, that we can't – or publishers fear we can't – process too much undiluted foreignness?
Harry Potter is a high-profile example that has divided opinion. Famously, the U.S. edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone became Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Did the publisher believe Americans were frightened of philosophy, or was it simply a ploy to stir up potential book-banning controversy?
Inside the covers, the Scholastic-published U.S. editions had words changed where they had different meanings in the two countries, for example replacing “jumper” with “sweater” or “note” with “bill” (for money). Many American readers still prefer the British editions, feeling that something is lost when the characters' own language is not retained.
Jamie Broadhurst at Raincoast Books, Harry Potter's Canadian publisher, notes that the history of the series is telling: “Whenever we announced a new book, Canadian fans would always ask whether we intended to keep the U.K. spellings. The answer was always yes. No one ever requested U.S. spellings.” In Canada, the books were the same as the British editions.
Although most readers tend to think that changes should be kept to a minimum, novels by authors from other predominantly white anglophone countries – places we tend to assume have the same language and values as ourselves – are frequently changed. Jonathan Bennett is an Australian writer whose books have been published first in Canada. He remembers tussling over the word “ute” in one of his books. In Australia, it's just the word people use. In the end, though, he agreed to go along with “truck,” which doesn't have the same resonance.
What is so bad about being exposed to the English of different regions?
Because Bennett lives in Canada, his editing is built into his writing: He knows the dangers of fetishizing local language and slang, but also the risk of something seeming phony to Australian readers. Bennett's most recent novel, Entitlement, is his first set in Canada. He went to great lengths to make sure that it sounded authentic and takes great pride that the book was not called un-Canadian by reviewers.
Sarah Bilston, a British expatriate living in New York, has written two novels whose main character is also a British expat living in New York. She essentially produces two different versions, one for the North American market and one for the British market, so language is a question that she considers with almost every sentence. Her U.S. editor initially changed all her English words and phrases (cot to crib, nappy to diaper etc.), but the publisher was willing to overrule the Americanization where a particular word was crucial to maintaining the authenticity of a voice.
Bilston also lets some American words creep in, believing that a moment of linguistic confusion can interrupt the pleasurable flow of reading. Going in the other direction, references to therapy were removed from the British edition because of fears they might be off-putting to the allegedly analysis-averse British reader. In a similar vein, the U.S. edition of Bridget Jones's Diary changed a number of cultural references and terms, including Bridget's weight, from stones to pounds.
