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Re: [Lingo] British English



On 02/04/2011 07:44 PM, Lyle H Saxon wrote:
On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 11:49 AM, CL<az.4tlug@example.com>  wrote:
Some of the other stuff made the "Flashman" series a lot more fun to
read ... and I was fortunate to have had a ninth-grade English teacher
who took me aside and said "Either spell it one way or the other.  I
don't care which.  Just pick one way to spell and stick with it."

So which way did you pick?

The one that paid the highest dividends at the time, of course. What that teacher taught me was to be consistent in the form I chose and not switch back and forth within the same article. It works well right up to the point where I have to remember which countries have a Labor Party and which ones have Labour ...

In the "old" days, publishers like Haynes and EMAP in the UK, Ziff-Davis and Petersen in the US, and Schraeder und Partner in Germany paid about 20% less for articles that required conversion to the local form of the English language than for those that were already mostly there. The Germans preferred US English for translation into Hochdeutsch (which I found strange because British seems to be grammatically closer to German), but I could mostly translate articles myself and they'd clean it up -- and they'd pay a month earlier if you did the bulk of the translation yourself.

Australians are the most difficult to write for because they can't seem to agree on spelling conventions from month-to-month and fight over it more than Canadians who mostly seem to want to be American west of Winnipeg and British east of Thunder Bay. I blame Rupert Murdoch. Then again, I blame Murdoch for everything I don't like about the publishing game. Well Murdoch and Twitter ... and blogs ... and Amazon's self-publishing service ... they've done for writing what the hand-held video camera did to cinematography ... (falls to floor frothing at the mouth and kicking blindly)

--
CL


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