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.
