> Now, I know a lot of you here read the Harry
>Potter books, because this is where I first
>heard of them. I've read all three now and I
>think they're great. But I have a question.
>
> Some time ago now, there was a discussion in
>the chatroom about some idiot school which
>banned the books. One reason was a perceived
>lack of politically correct ethnic diversity at
>Harry Potter's school. OK, this is insane for
>numerous reasons, not the least of which is the
>fact that there *are* characters of various non-
>white origins. (What the heck did they think
>Parvati Patel was? If that isn't an Indian name,
>what is?)

Ah, but you see, in America, "diversity" almost universally refers to either Black or Latino peoples. Indians don't count. ;-)

>
> But this isn't what my question is about. In
>the course of our discussion, somebody said a
>particular character (Dean Thomas) was black,
>naming a scene in the first book where it said
>so. I looked for this, and it wasn't in the
>scene in my book. I also found out that the
>first book "The Philosopher's Stone", was
>published in the USA as "The Sorcerer's Stone."
>
> What I want to know is, do they CHANGE the text
>of books, or add things, to make the story more
>"acceptable" in different countries? I hope not,
>but if so, what do you all think about that? Am
>I the only one who thinks it would be completely
>wrong?

Yes, actually, I believe this is unfortunately a rather common practice, especially when a translation is involved from the original language of the story to the vernacular of the country. For instance, I read an interview with Philip K. Dick in which he told of how he refused to let his book "The Man in the High Castle" (a book set in an alternate reality in which the AXIS powers won WWII, and describing the rather terrible world that resulted from that) be released in Germany until he had personally gone over the German language translation. He went over it wordy by word, and was appalled at what the translators had done to his work. They hadn't "softened" his anti-Nazi message nearly as much as he had feared, but they had changed the whole tone of the book from a thought-provoking SF novel to a slam-bam adventure novel. The response he got from the translators when asked why they had done this was "We didn't know you could read German."

>
> The title change, too, struck me as wrong. A
>philosopher's stone is a well-known historical
>and literary item from medieval alchemy -- as it
>was described in the book. A "sorcerer's stone"
>means nothing, although it sounds nicely
>wizardy. Changing the title removed the meaning
>completely. Why dumb it down? Did they think
>American kids can't cope with words of more than
>three syllables or something, while British kids
>can?

Oh, this sounds to me like a fairly common thing to do for American audiences. It's not so much "dumbing it down", (although in a sense that's exactly what they're doing) as trying to give people "what they expect". They figure no kid is going to read a book about philosopher's (thinking, perhaps even rightly so, that most American children aren't going to *know* what "The Philosopher's Stone" refers to), so they changed the name to be "better reflect" the contents of the book.

>
> I heard there were some other changes from the
>British to the American version. But it's *set*
>in Britain! That's where it's *from*! I strongly >disagree with editing out regional or local
>flavour for the benefit of readers in other
>parts of the world. If kids don't understand
>something in a book, they'll ask, or go and find
>out. They'll learn. That's half the point of
>great children's books like Harry Potter, surely?

No, the point of great children's books is to make the publisher oodles of money. And if flavor is spelled with a "u", it won't make any money in America, or so the thought-pattern of some people goes. I think it's abhorent to edit British books for petty things like Americanizing the spelling, but it happens all the time. Americans are notoriously ethnocentric--we generally expect the whole world to talk and think and spell like we do.

On the other hand, I've heard of publishers editing *in* British-spellings of words for American books that are to be released in the UK or other places that use British-style spelling, so it's probably a double-edged sword.

-- Dave