Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
To the honest, my response to it would be "why bother"? If a book has British punctuation, that probably indicates that it is a British book, with British spelling, British punctuation rules (which are different to those most commonly employed in the US), and so on. I'd simply accept that UK books are not the same as US books and read each for what it is.
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My interest in this subject goes in the opposite direction -- UK or Australian books published in American English.
Here in Australia, it's most common for books (both physical and digital) to be printed in American English, often physically printed overseas but with a localised cover added before shipping off to the bookshops. (Just gotta love globalisation.) For instance, I was recently given the first novel in an urban fantasy series by John Twelve Hawks as a present; the title was given as "The Traveller" on the cover and spine, but as "The Traveler" throughout the body of the book. I recently bought William Golding's "Lord of the Flies", a British novel from the 1950s, published by Faber & Faber, a British publisher; the copy I received was spelt and punctuated in American English throughout, including phrases actually being altered to modern American idiom, such as "sweets shop" to "candy store". (Shades of Harry Potter!)
I personally find American punctuation and spelling a bit of a speed hump in my reading. (That's not attempting to comment on American English, but on my own cognition habits.) So with e.books I'm likely to re-read, I will sometimes modify the contents to my version of English, so that that doesn't get in the way. (They're only for my own use, so why not?) The process is simplified by my personal preference for double quotation marks with reported speech, but it's still laborious.
Even a step like moving sentence punctuation marks outside quotation marks isn't straightforward, because it depends on context and can't be done by a global search-and-replace. I tend to use broad strokes, and then refine them manually. (And sometimes a spelling checker cn help.)
Hmm. I think I've just affirmed your "why bother?" response.
