I’ve been reading Ken MacLeod’s 1996 novel The Stone Canal, in its 2000 U.S. edition (actually its 2001 mass-market paperback edition, published by Tor). The book’s enjoyable and well written, but what struck me was the editing. Ken MacLeod is a Scottish writer, and his books have been published first in the United Kingdom, then republished in the United States. I know that the U.S. editions have been given an editorial once-over to “Americanize” the language; it’s a common practice, at least in popular-genre writing, though it’s one that I dislike and that I feel shows a fundamental lack of respect for our shared language. (Do American publishers “Americanize” the prose of Kingsley Amis, Doris Lessing, Patrick White, Rebecca West, Evelyn Waugh?)
There was one point where the prose of Ken MacLeod’s novel had not been Americanized, and I suspect it was a slip on the part of the copyeditor: a reference to a husband getting someone’s address out of his wife’s “diary.” In the UK, a diary might be nothing more personal than an appointment calendar – my own annual calendar is a hardbound datebook called A4 architects & designers diary – but in the US a diary is something a great deal more personal: one’s intimate daily thoughts, recorded privately in a handwritten book for no one’s eyes but our own. (Or published far and wide on Livejournal; it depends on the diarist’s sense of privacy.) The American sense of “diary” gave that brief sentence an emotional weight that it was clear MacLeod didn’t intend; figuring that out took me out of the story and broke my concentration for a moment, which was not what was called for at that point in the novel. Tinkering with a writer’s prose is risky; but smoothing it out and then missing something gives whatever you’ve missed more importance than it warrants.
Whoever copyedited this book also had a habit of combining “on” and “to” into “onto” profligately, without apparently stopping to think about whether they really did belong together. They don’t always; and the same may be said of “in” and “to” vs. “into.” If you drive down the street and turn in to the police station, you haven’t suddenly metamorphosed into a police station; you’ve simply entered its parking lot. By the same token, moving on to the next subject is not the same as moving onto the next subject. (Ouch!) I have no idea whether this thoughtless glitch was introduced in the U.S. edition or the original British edition, but either way, its results were distracting. Editing can never be done automatically.
I enjoyed the book, though.
Great article! thanks. And if you like idioms you should check this page out http://www.k-international.com/french_idioms It gives a list of French idioms with their English translations – really shows how funny language is out of context (and what a nightmare it can be to translate languages!). :-)
John, you’re quite right. Had I properly edited my own rant it would have specifically addressed ‘bad’ copyediting, which for the most part is the only copyediting (whether by omission or commission) that we’re ever aware of. The massive body of the iceberg floats beneath the surface, doing its job well. And of course in those publishing circumstances in which the author has the final say on the text, changes by editor and copyeditor, accepted by the author, become implicitly part of the author’s revised voice.
Knowing your appreciation of language, Patrick, and your own way with words, I’m not surprised that you’ve been waging the fight against “Americanizing” novels. Good luck in the trenches.
The older I get, the less impressed I am with consistency. Clarity, on the other hand, is the highest virtue of writing – at least of non-artistic writing, and most of the time in fiction and poetry, too.
Paul, your parenthetical rant about copyeditors is a pretty good description of copyediting run amuck, but it needs to be balanced by an acknowledgment of what really good copyediting can do for a book. A good copyeditor is worth his or her weight in gold; a bad copyeditor is a hazard to communication.
I hate the practice of “Americanizing” British novels, and I’ve been fighting a gradually more and more successful crusade against it here at Tor. I agree that some of what got done to our edition of The Stone Canal was ill-considered, and in internal arguments about the issue, I’ve even cited some of the same things you did.
That sort of translation – let’s call it what it is – of works from one dialect of English to another really bugs the fuck out of me particularly when, as seems to be usually the case, the translation is unannounced and uncredited, allowing the reader to assume that the wording is the author’s own. (I suppose this is also my complaint about copyediting in general, which so often goes beyond the correction of obvious typographical and grammatical lapses and extends it slimy tentacles to the realms of error creation and whimsical rewriting, all unflagged and uncredited as though word choice were a mere technicality, the most minor of mechanical tweaks to the great appliance of litchahchuh.) When a North American idiom is spoken in a novel taking place in the UK, am I to look for the foreign cultural influence in the character’s background? or suspect the author of making a telling point of language or culture that I should try to nut out? Most likely I’ll just grouse about the idiocy of the North American republisher who fails to understand that language *is* culture.
The underlying assumption seems to be that we are all so parochial and thick that, if presented with vocabulary or grammar that wasn’t what we heard every day in our own locale, we would scurry about in a panic waving our hands in the air and shrieking, or perhaps more to the point that we wouldn’t buy another such unnervingly challenging text from that author or that publisher. I’m guessing that this convention has borne from tributary decisions made by publishing CEOs with more experience with crisp and nappie packaging labels than with literature. When is it to our benefit to strip a work of its own local color and fit it to the great uniform grey of the momentarily-dominant culture? (Assembly instruction manuals are, of course, a case unto themselves.)
Which speaks to a larger malaise, that of the dull stupidity of the dominant monoculture in which the value and even the existence of other cultures is belligerently denied, in which people with ‘accents’ or who don’t speak English at all are assumed to be ignorant and uneducated, and in which everything must be translated into familiar terms to be acceptable, reinforcing the notion that, yes, Virginia, the Empire does indeed encompass the entire world, with just a few ignorant savages still angrily insurging in our more remote territories, too low-born or too just plain nasty to speak as well as does the President.
In the UK, the word ‘diary’ seems pretty much interchangeable between the book of dates on my desk that reminds me of which meeting I’m currently missing and the chunky book in which I write a few pages daily about my life (though, of course, in the MacLeod the mention of the address suggests it’s a book of dates, and the copy-editor ought to have picked that up). I call the latter my ‘journal’ (which I always think of as a USian usage) but I am sure some people think I’m being pretentious. It’s a diary, a private one, but a diary nonetheless.
In the UK, a calendar is the thing with dates and a pretty picture for every month that we hang on the wall to tell us something or other. (I’m never entirely sure what a calendar is for – decoration or utility?)