Although I think that things should be properly localised (video games are particularly bad for not doing this) I think that the point you raise does identify a problem: you just need to look at Wikipedia to see the relentless edit-warring between different variants of English to see its effect. That said, it does seem to be a particular problem that's mostly caused by Wikipedia's unworkable policies in that regard, but it is a bit of a pain.

Some of the things in that list of translations are a bit strange though, such as "bollard" being changed to "wastebasket".

A large good portion of Brittish stuff exported to America is changed in a way that it'll better suit Americans, usually written works or TV shows. Then again America never had anything going for achieveing proper English spelling/communication even with the majority of their origins being from that country.

Like changing the gay teen in skins into a pair of lisbian cheerleaders...
can't have any of those nasty gay people unless they're attractive lisbians.


The hypocrisy of some things.

Actually, there's a bit of a sliding scale involved, with both jam and jelly being part of it even in England. Conserves have big chunks of fruit, and will tend to be runny-ish. Jellies are smooth and consistent, with no or at most little visible fruit (hence the name being borrowed by the gelatin stuff). Jams are somewhere in between.

I don't know.... in the almost two years I've been in Australia, I haven't met anyone who actually speaks like that. Some probably do speak like that, but I'd guess that most of the population speaks universally-understood English.

Part of it is due to a deliberate movement to get words to match up better with modern pronunciations and cut out letters that were seen as unnecessary. Things such as "armour"/"armor" or the various words where "s" was swapped for "z" are examples of this (I think ). O'course, some of those may not work quite as well for people with different accents.

Differences like "zed"/"zee" are, I'm pretty sure, due to more organic factors.

I don't use "aye" compulsively -that's more of a Queensland/edges of NSW thing- but the rest of the words are in my normal vocabulary . 90% of what I say would be entirely understandable to foreign anglophones, but I reckon "right at home" is a bit of an exaggeration .

I can't believe the British version could be that hard to understand for Americans. Do you guys sit there, read the word 'mum' and go 'MY GOD, WHAT COULD THIS POSSIBLY MEAN?'

I guess it may be a regional thing, here in Hobart I haven't heard anyone use 'bogan' except in a sardonic way.

I guess it's down to, like you said, pronunciation. I've never thought much about how words sound vs how they're spelt. But there are even words that were perfectly fine in normal English that the Americans thought to give another name.

Not Americans in general, though it does seem that Webster viewed his work on the English language as a sort of vanity project; I did hear a comment a while back that so many arbitrary changes to a language's usage is really quite unusual. At least things didn't go as far as he wanted, he apparently got quite carried away with the idea of spelling reform. If the comments about him wanting to sow the seeds for America to have its own language are true, it seems he wasn't really very forward-thinking: creating obstacles to communication is a rather more serious issue than the supposed benefits of having one's very own language, I'd have thought.

Its always astounded me that people feel the words need changing to sell a British book in America. Does it happen the other way around? Are there American books which are 'translated' into English?

It's not at all uncommon for books to be edited when they cross the Atlantic. Less so when they go from the US to Britain, but I suppose that's the price we Brits have to pay for no longer possessing the cultural hegemony.

That depends on who you are - there are plenty of languages out there that have been at least somewhat manufactured for nationalist purposes.

Some have the spelling changed, though I think it's more unusual for phrases and so on to be altered. I'm not really convinced that the latter is a good thing, but having the right spelling for a particular region is important: I find it rather distracting otherwise, and see it as rather lazy and unprofessional if a publisher has the opinion "meh, it's close enough so we can't be bothered."

I think my inner Anglophile has taken over my mind, I didn't even understand some of the American English sides, but knew the left side without guessing. Also, Rowling must find us dumb, because the AE version has Apparating explained to you where the BE version is just 'Apparating is difficult'

I suppose I rather naively hope that such changes tend not to have too much permanence...

That just made my morning.

We have lots of silent letters in words. That and we don't have an obsession with the letter "z".

The extent of the words usage would depend a bit on the quantity of bogans in the area, I expect. For example, I might describe Frankston (a suburb of Melbourne) as being full of bogans and druggies, but Oakleigh (another suburb) is way more woggy. Toorak, on the other hand, is dominated by wankers (I'm tempted to put Brunswick in the same basket ).

Sidenote: It felt kinda odd to be using all those local placenames here.

Mum the word .

That depends... is the royal family likely to read it?

It happens a lot, and I think it's awful. I can understand changing the spelling of words in kiddie books so as not to confuse them, but changing words and in effect svcking all of the little cultural references out of it seems stupid to me. The title of the first Harry Potter book really got me - it seemed like they were basically saying "we think American children are too stupid to want to read anything with the word Philosopher in it". They've done the same thing in Winnie the Pooh books too - apparently "skipping rope" is beyond their comprehension and had to be changed to "jump-rope". It seems these US publishers really don't think very highly of their younger demographic.

I think reading a book which is about a different part of the world is fun - I remember being slightly grossed out when I read somewhere about someone wearing a "sweater" and imagining what it could be (woolly jumpsuit which made you sweat), and then I asked my Mum and I learnt something new.

It makes me sad that I genuinely feel this is what most US editors likely believe. It's like 'How can we make this book more American and simple, I mean, after all, who wants to spend all day reading when we could be watching MTV?'

I also find it funny that they removed a lot of occasions of violence when they made the American version, but also changed the sorting hat scene to go "OMG! A black guy!"

I think that changing any novel from its original form is a disgrace. What about the classics? Is there some agenda to eradicate all forms of culture from this planet? What happened to the joy of discovering things for yourself. I'm British, and when I read Kerouac, I don't want it to be changed in any way whatsoever. I want it as he wrote it.

I don't like any changes in translation, when I want to read a book, I want the original. Translation can make or break a book. This is even more aggravating when it's an older work and all I can find are re-writes translated by rewriters who translated what the new author wrote. So much backtracking!