Learning to Speak American
An article by Tim Parks (distinguished speaker for the ILD in Boston) on the perils for a British English speaker of writing/translating for the US market
In 1993 I translated all 450 pages of Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus & Harmony
without ever using the past participle of the verb “get.” The book was
to be published simultaneously by Knopf in New York and Jonathan Cape in
London; to save money both editions were to be printed from the same
galleys; so it would be important, I was told, to avoid any usages that
might strike American readers as distractingly English or English
readers as distractingly American. To my English ear “gotten” yells
America and alters the whole feel of a sentence. I presumed it would be
the same the other way round for Americans. Fortunately, given the high
register of Calasso’s prose, “get” was not difficult to avoid.
More >> http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/dec/14/learning-speak-american/
lunedì, dicembre 17, 2012
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