Editing for both sides of the pond

One of the things I often come across in the course of my work is having to Americanise (or anglicise) text. I’ve also been called on to create “universal” text at times, too, which can be something of a challenge (you try writing a 128-page non-fiction book for children on almost any subject without mentioning the word “colour” and you’ll see what I mean).

Now, I wouldn’t claim to be able to pass for an American anywhere other than in print (my accent is just a bit too Radio 4), but I think I have developed a bit of a sixth sense for divining the finer differences between the two Englishes on quite a few different topics. And while I will never learn to favour favor, I have come to love certain things about US English and genuinely enjoy the gentle pleasures of unravelling (or should that be raveling?) a piece of text for a whole different audience.

Some things are obvious. Everyone – editor or not – knows that colour, honour and so on lose their “u” on the transatlantic flight. But it took many years of getting it wrong and an American editor to point it out for me to realise that glamour is the same wherever you are in the world. (I never have claimed to know too much about glamour in any context. That’s why I work from home.)

Likewise, if it’s got an “ise” ending, just make it “ize” instead, right? Well, usually, yes. Just don’t get carried away, especially if you’re venturing into ‘Find and replace’ territory (more of which a little later). Did you ever see an American improvize or advertize anything?

I’m not going to say too much about commas, because everyone (every publisher, editor and schoolchild) has their own, probably equally valid, opinions about how commas work, whatever side of the Atlantic they’re on. Suffice to say that Americans (usually – not always) like the serial comma more than we do. Though I gather the serial comma is also big in Oxford.

Americans prefer double quotes, just as we, often, prefer single (though I quite like double; we learnt it that way at school). And yes, they do position them differently with regard to punctuation – always outside the comma or full stop (though not outside the colon or semicolon). “Like this,” “this,” “this,” or “this” (note the serial comma, too). It might look odd to a Brit at first, but it kind of grows on you.

As with every other aspect of editing and proofreading, I imagine that Americanisation is a prime example, to a layperson, of a task that could be accomplished perfectly adequately by a machine. There’s a “Find and replace” function in Word, or InDesign, isn’t there? In response to which I would cite my dismal experience, many years ago, of doing a global find and replace in a book about cake decorating. I substituted the word “pan” for “tin” and felt quite pleased about how much time I had saved with a single click, not to mention my mastery of American baking terminology. Only to read the whole thing through later on (before it went to print, thankfully) and feel a little puzzled by the malicious insertion of such made-up words as “continupang”, “interestpang” and “sitpang”. That took a little while to reverse.

Of course there are the unspaced em dashes where we would used spaced en dashes. But this is really venturing into the realms of high geekery in the eyes of most people, who view any kind of dash longer than a humble hyphen as impossibly esoteric and most definitely optional. (Back in the real world, even the days of the hyphen seem numbered.)

Happily, there are many resources on the Internet to help you when you’re Americanising or anglicising, whether the subject is knitting (do you cast off or bind off?), cookery (should you measure by volume or weight, and what the heck is cilantro?), jewellery/jewelry making (just how do you describe the thickness of wire?) or even just trying to get an idiomatic phrase right (does an event impact on the schedule, or simply impact it?).

There will always, as with any other publishing endeavour, be things to trip you up. Things you might not have thought of, unique to the particular project or type of project you’re working on. For instance, if you’re working on anything that is both alphabetical and illustrated (a children’s dictionary, say), you need to remember that you’re probably not going to be able to move the pictures for the new edition – only revise the text. So don’t illustrate anything that starts with a different letter in US English than it does in British English. Think of curtains/drapes, tadpole/polliwog (this whole post was really about giving me the chance to use the delicious word “polliwog”) or tap/faucet, for instance.

Finally, I don’t ever like to feel too purist about or defensive of British English. We can learn a lot about all sorts of things from the variations of our language, and not just at the level of simple curiosity. For instance, a very simple example is that I never really “got” time signatures in music, which I encounter regularly in my other life as a very amateur musician, until I learnt the American terminology for notes of different lengths. How much more straightforward and graphic is a “quarter note” than a “crotchet”, or a “sixteenth note” than a “semiquaver” when you’re trying to work out how many beats there are in a bar (or measure)? Thank you, US English.