Quote:
Originally Posted by maddz
So I would say that the difference is almost certainly down to localisation between the UK and the US markets. By all accounts, Wyndham's novels were edited for the US market - at the time, Americans would have been less familiar with British English and cultural references than they are now, and US publishers tended to change manuscripts heavily to make them more accessible for US readers. Quite apart from anything, the presence of untranslated Latin (and other languages) quotes would necessitate that - even I can't translate them now and I did Latin at school until I was 15.
|
I used to hate localization, but then I reread the Harry Potter books using the UK edition and realized that a lot of stuff that was changed wasn't consequential, but helped readers understand what was being talked about. (Things like names of common candies in the UK vs the US.) I will say that even though I had to look up some stuff to find out what it was, it did make the books feel even more "British," but there's not shortage of that in the localized ones.
That said, sometimes localization goes berserk and ruins things. I can't think of any books that's happened with, but several anime got utterly butchered when someone decided they had to be localized to hell and back for the US market. (The poster child being the dub of
Cardcaptor Sakura, where the US studio heavily edited and rearranged the order of episodes, only airing 39 of 70, in large part to try and make the male appear to be the main character.)
If you can still read any Latin you're doing better than me with Spanish (two years in high school) and German (two years in college), both of which I've forgotten almost entirely.
