Do any of you work in publishing and get a chance to take a look at manuscripts as they are edited? An editor can do a lot to make the text sound more effective. Sometimes, though... Well, see below. Our publishing house often imports books from England and Australia. Those books are written in English, but the choice of wording needs to be "Americanized" to make the text understandable to American audience. I work in the children's division and handle books for children and young adults. So, here's an example, importing from Great Britain to U.S. teens: Change from "...an area of south-west France. Mountains, fields, and cities became visible..." to "...an area in the Caribbean. Beaches, fields, and small towns became visible..." Share your own examples if you have any. I promise to come back to this thread whenever I spot something hilarious.
I'm an editor of corporate writing and it's often helpful to make changes like that. People give me things that they wrote five years ago when they were working three thousand miles away. That is a head-scratcher in Washington, where the beach is to the east, nobody has heard of Van Nuys, and gas is now well over $4 a gallon. I agree, I don't understand the point of the change in your example. Admittedly few American kids know where France is anymore, but they know it has mountains, fields and cities. If the story was full of European cultural landmarks, then of course you might want to change them to something more familiar. All you need to do to Americanize that sentence is take the hyphen out of "southwest," or go a step further and change it to our more usual form, "southwestern." I'm in the middle of a novel written in the U.K. and, inexplicably, published here without normalizing the spelling. I never knew they write "for ever" as two words. You learn something every day.
We sometimes don't go to great lengths to Americanize, so we leave "mum" but make sure important things are straightened out. That happens when we're pressed for time. The editing says a lot about the different audiences. We did an import of Out of His League, from Australia, about a teen who comes to study in Southern U.S. for a year and joins a football team. There was a very racist passage about Mexicans having lots of kids, we had to take that out. I was surprised such a thing would pass in Australia.
I'd presume it's because there are few Mexicans in Australia, so they don't have to bother to be very PC about it.
Prosperity is the most effective contraceptive. The average family size in any given country has a strongly negative correlation with its per-capita GDP. If you say it that way, it's sociology. If you say "Mexicans have lots of kids," it's sociology in Australia, but racism in America. The standards are more lenient in Australia.
I'll pull up that passage about Mexicans next time I have a free half hour. Okay, continuing on the subject, this is from the second book that belongs in the same series as the book from which I quoted in the OP: Global change: from Ukrainian to Italian; from Ramius to Russo.
Yea, the author objected. In the book, the characters are supposed to travel all over the world and meet all sorts of strange people, so I'd say it's okay to even leave France and not replace it with the Caribbean islands. The editor tried to decide where the main characters live and she wants to bring them farther west. I would suppose that there wouldn't be many Italians in mid-west or on the west cost either; and places that have a lot of Italians also have a lot of Ukrainians. U.S. has seen a lot of immigrants from the former USSR area since the beginning of 20th century, so there are a lot of ethnic Ukrainians everywhere; on the other hand, their visibility is a recent trend. Up until the 90s or so, immigrants tried to assimilate and to appear as American as possible.
Have you forgotten Al Capone? There's been a huge Italian-American community in Chicago, the capital of the Midwest, for more than a century. California is America's vineyard, so we've got a lot of Italian families out here too. Drive through Wine Country and you'll notice all the names are Italian. Take a good look at San Francisco: Moscone Center, Ghirardelli Square, Alioto's; North Beach is Little Italy. There are a lot of Italian surnames in local politics there. Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, is from the SF region. Bank of America was started by a group of Italian businessmen right after the San Francisco Earthquake, when people were desperate for loans to rebuild. Some say it was a Mafia undertaking, and like all the rest of the Mob business, they went legit long ago because there's more money to be made that way. Nonetheless I find it interesting that BoA is one of the few banks in America that doesn't seem to be having any problem at all with people not wanting to pay back their loans. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
