This thread is a focused discussion group. Please see the first post below for the current topic and upcoming book discussions. While natter will inevitably happen, we encourage you to treat this like a virtual book club and try to keep your posts in that spirit.
By consensus, this thread is reopened specifically to discuss Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It will be closed again once that discussion has run its course.
***SPOILER ALERT***
- **Spoilers for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows lie here. Read at your own risk***
Yet someone there put the added time and effort in to "translate" (for lack of a better word) a book no one really believed too deeply in, and in the competitive U.S. children's book market, it probably made all the difference.
For what it's worth, "translating" books from British to American English is quite common. The sister of my college roommate's first job in publishing was "translating" books for Doring Kindersley.
I remembering around the time of PoA finding a website detailing all the differences between the two editions. I'm sure it's still out there.
Speaking of translation, I learned from my cousins in Montreal that a number of character names are changed in the French translation to maintain the jokes and references. Unfortunately I don't remember any examples, although I do think that Filch was one of the characters with a name change.
I still reread my Elizabeth Enright on occasion, and they're still good. The Melendys were the family I wanted to be part of, instead of my own.
My grade school library had an omnibus version of the first three Melendy books, and I was at a stage where thick was the deciding factor because most of the books for my age group were too damned short. I think I read that omnibus about three times a year.
List of changes:
I'll bet a penny you didn't even need to google that.
This one seems more complete: [link]
I never knew the British were so mad (that's crazy for you Yanks!) about hyphens.
But neither is the one I initially found which was went through at least the first three books.
The whole "Bat-Bogey Hex" thing confused me until I read somewhere that bogey = booger. I think that was the only unchanged British word that I either didn't know or couldn't figure out.
Huh. Looks like they also added the commas for compound sentences. And in at least one case, fixed the subjunctive. Are British rules for those things different?
The Skiving Snackbox has taken me years to figure out.
I still reread my Elizabeth Enright on occasion, and they're still good. The Melendys were the family I wanted to be part of, instead of my own.
God yes, I loved the Gone Away Lake books. The second one was very dykealicioius too, as I recall.
