Of Bollards
and Muggles
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (FEBRUARY 2004)
At
the annual convention of the National Council of Teachers
of English, publishing veteran Manuela Soares,
most recently Managing Editor at Scholastic,
addressed the perils and perplexities of Americanizing
the British editions of children’s books — such as the
overzealous copyeditor who once changed Boots Chemist
to CVS Pharmacy, much to the author’s dismay. We’ve
excerpted a few Harry Potter–related
highlights here.
Up until a few years ago, a huge publishing success
in Britain was known as a “bomb” — as in “the book bombed.”
It’s not exactly what we would say in the US. Speaking
of bombs in the British sense brings me to Harry
Potter, one of the more famous of recently Americanized
books. I read somewhere that the Americanizations in
Harry Potter have been minimized because Scholastic
has to get the books out pretty much simultaneously
with the British edition. I have to tell you that was
never the case. Arthur Levine, the editor of
the series, paid a great deal of attention to Americanizing
the text and had strong opinions about what and how
to Americanize. He worked closely with the author to
make sure that all changes were approved.
In the beginning, it was necessary to change words like
pitch to field, or hangings to
curtains. But as the books progressed, the British
words and phrases became clearer to the reader, and
so fewer changes were made, especially in light of the
movies, where words like pitch were not changed.
So as the movies appeared, fewer Americanizations were
made to the books. Of course, we did begin Book 1 with
a title change: The Philosopher’s Stone became
The Sorcerer’s Stone in the US. There are a great
many people who object to changing the title in the
first place. But the thinking was that sorcerer had
more meaning to American audiences than philosopher
in this context.
The first three books were the easiest in one way, because
they had already been published in the UK. But they
were harder in other ways because we were just discovering
how much detail there was to keep track of. Eventually,
the Harry Potter style manual we created for
the series ran to 65 pages, outlining everything from
the names of professors, potions, and spells, to the
members of each house and their ages, the names of their
pets, the titles of their schoolbooks, how many floors
there are in the Ministry of Magic, and exactly where
Arthur Weasley works. In Book 1, our changes included
sellotape to scotch tape, sherbet lemon
to lemon drop, and packet of crisps
to bag of chips. In Book 2, changes included
bollards to wastebaskets, wonky
to crooked, and pop my clogs to kick
the bucket. And in Book 3 we changed Father Christmas
to Santa Claus and gormless to clueless.
Books 4 and 5 presented enormous time constraints. The
simultaneous publication, along with pressure to publish
the next book as soon as possible, made it harder logistically.
It was a very tight schedule, but we not only kept to
our schedule, but delivered pages to our manufacturing
department a few days early. Among the many references
to schoolwork in Book 5, set us became assigned
us and revising became studying. Another
difference is that collective nouns take plural verbs
for the Brits (the team were jumping up and down).
The instruction to the copyeditor was to query every
instance of this usage; usually we retained the form
in dialogue, but changed it elsewhere.
Since Harry Potter has had incredible appeal
for readers as young as age 5 up to adults, do you Americanize
for the youngest reader? Or older? And if so, how old?
In the end, the point of Americanizing books is not
to purge them of all their regional quirks and peculiarities.
We believed that these changes, however egregious you
may consider them, helped younger readers and made the
text more understandable for them.
©2004
Publishing Trends
