SubscribeIt is a common fallacy that a text can be restyled in British-to-American or American-to-British English merely by running it through the appropriate spellchecker. The differences between British and American English involve not just spelling, but style, grammar, punctuation, typography and vocabulary – to say nothing of the important cultural differences.
That is how I am able to make a living out of "translating" between British and American English.
The Spoken Word - Divergence Or Convergence?
The British are generally more aware of the variations between the two main forms of spoken English than are their American counterparts. This is partly due to the influence of the cinema and the subsequent arrival in Britain of the GIs during World War II. When the first American 'talkies' were shown in Britain, they had to be subtitled because the British had never heard an American accent or American slang and couldn't understand the dialogue! I had always assumed that 'upper class' Americans sounded like Margaret Dumont, the poor woman who acted as a foil for the Marx Brothers, but I recently learned that although she was a member of American 'society', she was actually of British origin, so no wonder her American accent was less pronounced.
The differences are by no means confined to dialogue and dialect speech, what linguists call the 'familiar register'. Perhaps the most vital difference is in the way the date is written. Throughout the rest of the English-speaking world, the date is written dd/mm/yyyy in figures, with the day in front of the month when written out in full. But not in the United States. In the U.S., the date is written mm/dd/yyyy and the day is written after the month and without a 'th', as in December 12, 1964. Nor are full stops instead of obliques recognized as being valid, in the U.S., 6.12.94 might not even be recognized as a date! For some reason, the American forces ('the military') use the European style of date, and this can cause massive confusion.
When I first visited the United States in the 1970s, the immigration forms required you to write the date the universal way but the customs forms required you to write it the American way! Fortunately, that has now been changed and immigrants are honoured by being allowed to write the date the way they are accustomed. American lawyers who have received a document from the United Kingdom or had a document translated into British English have, on occasion, had to go into court and swear an oath in the witness box about a crucial date. For example, 1/12 - which would be 1st December to Europeans but to Americans it would be 12th January!
As for vocabulary, certain words have completely different meanings on the other side of the Atlantic. To 'continue' a case in British English means to enable it to carry on immediately; to 'continue' a case in American English means to postpone it to another day. Similarly, to 'table' a motion or proposal in British English means to deal with it right away. The same expression in American English means to shelve it indefinitely. Talking of 'right away', the Americans still use 'presently' in the sense of 'immediately', a meaning it has not had in the UK since Elizabethan times. Other throwbacks to old English that the Americans are fond of are 'yonder' and 'pay no mind'. The pavement in British English is the sidewalk in American English but the 'pavement' in American English means the roadway, also known to Americans as the 'blacktop'.
Major differences in vocabulary occur in areas in which the two cultures have diverged. These include law, construction and architecture, transport, food and cookery and the home. Examples include 'shake' (for roof tiles), 'fieldstone' (crazy paving), 'burlap' (hessian), 'diaper' (nappy), 'shade' (for window-blind, although blind is also used for certain types of shade!), 'dust ruffle' (valance), 'valance' (pelmet) and 'baseboard' (skirting board). Banking and finance are other areas in which the two languages diverge. A 'routing code' in American banking is a 'sort code' in British banking. In accountancy, 'private ledger' in America is 'bought ledger' in the UK.
Style And Punctuation - A Brief Survey
In British English, words like 'can't', 'don't', etc. are not generally used in advertising or publicity material but Americans would consider 'cannot' and 'do not' as too formal. Americans tend to use 'utilize' when "use" would do perfectly well, and we are all familiar with the dreadful 'at this time' when we would say 'now'. 'We cannot utilize your services at this time' is the euphemistic way the Americans have of saying 'You're fired!' Another important stylistic difference is that Americans tend to use 'that' when the British would be using 'which'. I was recently given a document to 'translate' which began 'We appreciate your attention to this required documentation'. What they were trying to say is 'Thank you for taking the time to complete this form'.
As for punctuation, in books, Americans use double quotation marks rather than single and the full stop (known as a period) and comma are always inserted inside the quotation marks, rather than outside, but are generally outside brackets if this is appropriate to the meaning. In British typography, a dash is an en-dash surrounded by two spaces, in American typography a dash is an em-dash without spaces around it. Semi-colons and colons are rarely used in American punctuation but commas are used more lavishly than in British English, and the so-called 'Oxford comma' (placing a comma before 'and' in a string of nouns) is standard.
As for spellings, although 'color', 'flavor' etc. are familiar, British people are confused by the failure to double certain letters in American spelling. 'Private Eye', quoting from an American book, wrote 'traveler [sic]' as if this were a mistake, when in fact it is the correct American spelling. There is a perfectly logical rule behind the use of a single letter in U.S. style where a double letter would be used in British style - as in dialled, dialed, travelled, traveled, worshipped, worshiped, etc. but controlled is spelled the same way in both versions of English. The rule is simply that if the stress is on the syllable containing the 'l', it is doubled, otherwise it is not.
Cultural Differences
Pitfalls crop up in some surprising places. For instance, I recently had to edit a sex manual, in which there was mention of buying 'top shelf magazines at the newsagents'. There is no such thing as a 'newsagent' in the United States, newspapers and magazines may be bought from a newsstand in a few big cities such as New York and Los Angeles (there is actually only ONE newsstand in the whole of Los Angeles, it is world-famous and is between Hollywood and Vine). Magazines and newspapers are either home delivered or picked up in a convenience store or supermarket.
Children's books published in the U.S. often show a boy wearing a baseball mitt or football helmet. Of course, the vocabulary of American football and baseball is a totally foreign language, as is the vocabulary of cookery and many foods. A friend of mine who went to the U.S. walked into a greengrocery and asked for a scallion, knowing it was a vegetable but not having the faintest idea what it was! If she had been on the West Coast, neither would the greengrocer (anyway, there are no greengrocers on the West Coast, you buy your vegetables in the supermarket or at farmers' markets) they use the term 'green onion'!
This also illustrates the point that there are regional variations in speech and vocabulary in the U.S., although the Americans are astonished at our variations in speech and vocabulary over what are for them relatively short distances, such as between Glasgow and Edinburgh.
To Add To The Confusion...
If all this is confusing, here is some input from my fellow director at American Pie, Dan Henderson, a Texan by birth who lives in California:
'Nobody would think twice in America about naming a child Randolph (Randy) Pratt. The chain of equipment rental stores called B.U.M Equipment always raises a laugh among Brits, as did the name of the former coach of the New Orleans Saints football team, Bum Philips. Although a bum is a derelict in the U.S., we had no idea that in the UK it is a "butt" or "rear end"! The equivalent word in the U.S. is "bun" or "buns". Americans might consider "spotted dick" to be a symptom of a social disease (an American euphemism the Brits might not recognize, by the way). It is actually a dessert in the UK. American 'chicks' are "birds" in the UK (both expressions somewhat antiquated). Americans park on a driveway and drive on a parkway and for them jumbo shrimp (scampi or Dublin Bay prawns in the UK) is not a contradiction in terms. For some unfathomable reason, women wear a pair of panties or pantyhose (tights) but only one bra. When Americans send something somewhere by automobile or truck they call it shipping, but put it on a ship and it becomes cargo. [I have been in a lot of trouble when americanising text for the UK and using the word "shipping" instead of "dispatching" but "shipping" is the correct term in the US, no matter what way you send the goods]. Why is "abbreviation" such a long word? Here in the U.S., "slim chance" and "fat chance" mean the same thing, and they tend to say they "could care less" when what they mean is that they "couldn't care less"'.