Many current mysteries are written by Americans but feature an all-Brit cast, UK settings and Americanized text. I don’t read many, but find it hard to keep mindful of British accents and locations with these spellings. At the same time publishers don’t seem to mind putting out literary fiction that features nonstandard punctuation–dashes to introduce dialogue or does away with quotation marks entirely. This is sheer affectation, IMO. I find books like these difficult to read—I can’t turn off the screaming editor in my head. I gave up six pages into Christopher Cook’s stylish and highly praised (yet quotation-free) Robbers. It’s set in Texas, for chrissakes. Even George Bush uses quotations marks. (Or am I giving him too much credit?)

However, with Brit writers writing American characters in American settings (like Lee Child’s Jack Reacher thrillers), Americanization is probably the best choice—you’re not trying to evoke tones of Albion etc. But even with the best intentions, cross-cultural contamination (a la ‘rubber’) occurs. I got laugh from George MacDonald Frasier’s Flashman and the Redskins “…in the distance, a prairie dog howled.”) At Bouchercon last year, Jim Nisbett complained that his French publisher translated the phrase “a topless bar” as “a bar without a roof.” You’d think the French would know.

I wonder what the response is from across the Pond on this issue?

It can be very difficult to explain some of the differences. Although a friend of mine knew very well that her “biscuit” was our “cookie”, she had never had an American “biscuit”. I wound up sending a recipe so that she could make some herself. My time in England has been fairly limited. I doubt I would be in any position to judge if something in my writing should be changed or not for an audience there. How would I know if leaving it the same was making the story more authentic or less? To do it properly you really need to understand both cultures well, or at least have access to someone who understood the other culture well and knew mine well enough to discuss it with me.

I am fascinated by the difficulties. I spent about 6 months in Hungary on one project. For part of the time, I had the benefit of a technical translator who grew up there before the revolution and then came to the US. The insight he provided was amazing. It was obvious that although many people there, that we were dealing with, could speak English, there were often subtle and not so subtle miscommunications. They may have understood the dictionary meaning of the words, but the implication of the total paragraph was sometimes totally lost.

It gets even more complicated when you are trying to communicate subtleties by describing a situation. One time in the Netherlands we had a great conversation over dinner about what constituted a good waitress and good service. The same situation when viewed by us Americans and our Dutch friends was interpreted differently. Waitresses that we thought had been “efficient” and “attentive” they thought were “bossy”, “rude” and “pushy”.

Suppose, you have a book written in the US where the author is trying to get across to the reader that the waitress had one set of attributes. However this same situation would communicate something entirely different to someone from a different culture. How do you handle this? The problem exists even if the words are understood perfectly. I know there is no simple answer, but I find the implications of the problem to be so interesting. Many wars have been fought because of differences like these.

Someone mentioned that perhaps there should be books for different parts of the US. I would take it one step further. You need female and male versions of each book because we obviously speak different languages. Talk about wars …;-)

John

A couple other confusing words in the Brit/US crossover are “paraffin,” which in the UK means what we Yanks would call kerosene, and “corn,” which in the US now usually means only maize, whereas it can refer to any grain crop in Britain (and even in the US, though this meaning is seldom used anymore).

As the process of changing British usage for American readers continues, we will more and more become “two countries divided by a common language” (–attributed to George Bernard Shaw).

Robert: Yeah, I absolutely hate changing dialogue. Even in description, though, if the book is for adults, I think they can usually figure it out if it doesn’t misread. China’s Un Lun Dun (which is YA) will have a glossary for the British terms, which I think is wonderful.

Michele: “Towards” is more natural to me, too, and I’ve lived all over the US. :-)

G. Miki: Welcome to my blog. :-) “Eraser” is also used in the UK, though. I do believe in leaving the original terms where it’s not confusing.

Gina: With something like that, where it’s really important for the British emphases to stay, you would want to give your editor a note about it to pass along to the copyeditor.

Purple: I do believe that it works both ways and that works are indeed “de-Americanised” if recopyedited over there. If any British editors are reading this, perhaps they could offer further insight, though.

I guess that most of the commenter’s (and probably the readers) here are “American”, and it’s interesting that you’ve taken the angle that you have.

To be clear, I’m British (although I’m sure you worked that out from my ramblings, all of a sudden I’m very self conscious about what I’m writing! LOL)

Much of what you’ve discussed makes sense to me and I have no problem with it. As an avid reader of Fantasy and Sci-fi works from both sides of the pond, I’m fairly sure I’ve read both British and American books, and I know that I wouldn’t really notice the differences.

It made me think that the export of Culture itself has changed. The example words you used, Realise versus Realize, Honor versus Honour, are perfectly valid, but as a Brit reader I’d just whizz past them in any book, I wouldn’t even notice.

As Robert pointed out, the use of slang is more interesting, There are a great deal of American slang terms (or at least what I think of as slang) entering common use over here, a phrase like “that sucks” for instance which has both a descriptive and inferred meaning, but most of my countrymen (or the younger generations at any rate) would understand the inferred meaning. Some of the more interesting British slang however might make less sense to American readers, words or phrases with inferred meanings such as “chav”, or Robert’s example of “done a bunk”

I think you’re dead right to say that it depends on the context of the story, it would make no sense to have a British setting with “Highways” or an American setting with “Motorways”, and the characters’ mode of speech will of course need to reflect their background or origins.

What it did make me wonder is if texts become “de-Americanised” for the British market?

Anyway, thanks for a very interesting and thought provoking article!

I’ve tried to make the ‘period details’ (mostly politics and legal issues) clear for those born too late to remember the 80’s and not get bogged down in details that are alien to those outside Oxbridge academia, but would any of that make you stop and think about mking changes, or asking the author to clarify. Particularly asking because I just read Minette Walters novella, where there were two explanations in parentheses of historical details I would expect most people to know.

Thanks

Gina

I absolutely understand the delicacy of the editing process and the need to keep the reader inside the story. I do believe, however, that the reader also has some responsibility to understand the language of the original and the words that convey some essence of the culture itself.

Just for that, let me point out:

if a book does need Americanized

Hah! :-)

But seriously…Not so surprisingly, I agree with you pretty much on everything. For example, I grew up in Maryland, but I have always said “towards.” My father was Canadian; maybe I picked it up from him. I’ve never thought of it as particularly British.

I’m definitely more of the attitude of “let the reader think a little bit,” but I can understand the other side. In a book by a British author I worked on recently, the copy editor changed some things that I probably would have, such as “done a bunk” (= “run off suddenly”; it is in Web. 11, though, as “British”). And I can live with changing “car park” to “parking lot” when it’s in description–but it was also changed in the (English and Welsh) characters’ dialogue. That I wouldn’t have done.

Too often, Americanizing can create a strange sort of half-breed that doesn’t quite sound British of American. I say, let the British be British. I mean, nobody goes around Americanizing Dickens or Thomas Hardy, do they?

By the way, the same sort of thing goes on with British publishers of American authors. Donald E. Westlake complains somewhere in an interview that in the British edition of one of his books, [NYC's] “West Side Highway” was changed to “West Side Motorway.”