My friendly neighbourhood SF/F bookshop here in Edinburgh, Transreal Fiction, is now taking advance order for signed copies of Season of Skulls (follow the link to the bookshop's blog).
(I'll probably be popping in to sign stock at other bookshops in the area, but Transreal is the place to put down advance orders. Note that they won't be mailed out until on or after the official publication date.)
I got a reminder/query a few days back ... already ordered!
To me this seems on point but delete if you feel not.
What do you think of these two services I just tripped over. Do they help or hurt your income stream.
For Audio Books
libro.fm
And books in general
bookshop.org
As long as they're not selling pirated copies, they feed into my income stream.
(I don't follow audiobooks -- I'm not a consumer -- but I've heard of bookshop.org and I'm okay with them.)
Thanks for the reminder - afraid I'll buy it ebook (I loathe buying it for kindle, but if that's all I can get...). We have no room for more bookshelves....
Hint: if you buy it in ebook buy it as an epub from Google Books. You're in the USA so it'll be the Tor.com edition, which is DRM-free, and you can download from the Google Play books store and transcode via calibre.
(Note that Mail-to-Kindle's epub import is rubbish, so you may need to import the original epub into Calibre, transcode it into .mobi format to strip out some bells and whistles, then turn it into a docx or epub using Calibre before mailing it to your kindle account. If you read on kindle, that is.)
UK customers: it'll be published by Orbit, an imprint of Hachette, who insist on DRM on everything. So: US/Canadian customers can get it without DRM, but if your ebook store of choice shows you the cover at the top of this post -- the Orbit cover -- be aware it will come with DRM.
You can get it as an epub from Kobo, too, and, if it's DRM-free, no Calibre step is needed. DeDRM works on Kobo DRM, too.
I loathe Google nearly as much as Amazon.
Your search term for Kobo DeDRM is "obok plugin". It works a bit differently from the Kindle DeDRM. Advantage: still works with current Kobo DRM. Disadvantage: doesn't work with Kobo Plus books (the all-you-can-eat for $8.99 a month library service as opposed to the you-bought-a-copy-of-the-book service). Also, at least on macOS, the Kobo desktop app is a bit pants and it stores books in a SQL database rather than as epub files (although obok lets you extract them): it's not impossible that Kobo will change their back end at some point and completely break the plugin.
Wonderful. No, I don't want to buy kindle, and you've just told me I can get it as an epub... meaning that I can also copy it to my linux box, and back it up. (Me? Trust that it will still be available 10 years from now, from Amazon? Right, and I've got this bridge for sale....)
It doesn't on Linux.
Out of pure curiosity, is there any difference between the text in the UK and US editions?
Lately I'm being given a choice to get one or both, and I'm wondering.
(I'm stubbornly sticking to UK editions because that's what I started with.)
On second thoughts, both my Kobo and my app are over 10 years old. It is possible that its civilised behaviour is due to that, and that modern versions are nastier.
No difference whatsoever.
British readers will put up with US spelling and usage, so there's no additional money to be made from the enormous work involved in preparing, editing, and proofreading two differently-spelled editions. As my US publisher has more resources on the editorial side than the (smaller) UK publisher, they handle production workflow and my UK publisher just buys in the typeset InDesign files, reflows them, adds their own cover, and runs the text they get from the US.
(The only area in fiction where different editions are really a thing is in childrens/MG/YA fic, where schools and/or exam board and/or education authorities insist on local spelling and usage, so you lose sales if you don't localize for the other market.)
Note: In the US, the Laundry Files have gone through three hardback publishers (Golden Gryphon, Ace, now Tor.com) and have not been published in mass-market paperback since "The Annihilation Score". (The US mass market channel has pretty much collapsed, being replaced by ebooks as the "cheap reading edition" format: only runaway bestsellers get a mass market paperback these days). Also, Ace changed their cover design template halfway through. So the US hardcovers are all different sizes and designs.
The Laundry books have been published in the UK by Orbit and only Orbit, but the first four books never got a hardcover release. (The mass market disintegrated in the UK in the early 1990s, so all UK paperbacks are trade books. Only books expected to sell well got hardcovers in the early 00's, though, and it took until "The Rhesus Chart" for the Laundry to build to that level.)
Upshot: the only way to buy a consistent and uniform edition of the Laundry Files and New Management series is to get the Orbit paperback editions. Luckily, they settled on a consistent cover design language years ago and have stuck to it, apart from a tweak for the New Management books (different title font, different series logo on the spine). Also, because British publishing is Different and can re-print on paper cost-effectively for as few as 100 books, all of them are in print except "Season of Skulls" (which ain't out yet and won't be available in paperback until 4-12 months after the hardcover comes out next week).
Charlie Stross @ 12:
No difference whatsoever.
British readers will put up with US spelling and usage, so there's no additional money to be made from the enormous work involved in preparing, editing, and proofreading two differently-spelled editions. As my US publisher has more resources on the editorial side than the (smaller) UK publisher, they handle production workflow and my UK publisher just buys in the typeset InDesign files, reflows them, adds their own cover, and runs the text they get from the US.
(The only area in fiction where different editions are really a thing is in childrens/MG/YA fic, where schools and/or exam board and/or education authorities insist on local spelling and usage, so you lose sales if you don't localize for the other market.)
Just out of curiosity, what is the difference between U.K. localized spelling and U.S. localized spelling - other than the occasional word spelled with 'ou' instead of just plain 'o'?
Humour/Humor ...
Corporations are plural in the UK. Single in the US. And lots of other nouns. Which leads to all kinds of verb tense issues that can be jarring if you're not used to it.
Then is it the boot or trunk of a car, where is the pavement on a street, wrench or spanner, and on and on and on.
We spent 200 years diverging before movies and TV starting pulling us back together.
Just out of curiosity, what is the difference between U.K. localized spelling and U.S. localized spelling - other than the occasional word spelled with 'ou' instead of just plain 'o'?
Tons of stuff.
We don't have sidewalks, we have pavements. We don't have elevators, we have lifts. We don't have highways, we have A-roads or maybe dual carriageways. We don't have interstates, we have motorways. We don't have theaters, we have cinemas (a theatre is where you go to see a stage play or musical). We don't order carry-out, we have take-aways. You could care less: we couldn't care less. Institutions tend to be singular, not collective nouns (we go to hospital).
And so on.
To make it worse, some shared terms mean different things. A B&B in the USA is not equivalent to a B&B in the UK (this relates to the pre-AirBnB era, though). A driving license in the UK used to refer to an A4 sheet of paper with a list of endorsements on it, but no photograph. (We now get photocard driving licenses too, but the paper record remains.) Oh, and we use cheques, not checks (although they're increasingly rare).
Back in the 90s when I worked in the UK technical publications group of a US multinational, we had an internal manual for helping Brits write and edit US English. It was over 200 pages long (and was used in conjunction with the Chicago Manual of Style). Which, incidentally, gave me a huge advantage when I standardized on writing American(ish) English for my fiction. I'm not perfect, but I had years of training in it that most British authors don't get.
https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2011/04/bunting.html
Found a great blog on this subject while trying to figure out what the "bunting" all my Welsh friends were complaining about was. It goes deep.
"what is the difference between U.K. localized spelling and U.S. localized spelling"
Amusingly, it includes that Z :)
I do find it grates to see the British edition of a book set in Britain written by a British author using American spellings, and American word usages for British things are worse. On a fully conscious level I blame the publisher, but on a more semi-conscious level I do connect it more specifically with the author, so that if the first book I read by some author is like that it does lead me to expect that other books by the same author will be similarly irritating to read, and therefore that first book has to be unusually good in other respects to avoid putting me off investigating their other stuff.
Fortunately in Charlie's case I got into his work via the original Merchant Princes series, which isn't set in Britain and is unusually good. But I'm still grateful for his explanation above.
Checking the copy-edits on a manuscript takes 1-2 weeks of painstaking, boring labour. Checking the page proofs, ditto. Actively transforming a UK English manuscript into American usage, or vice versa, takes probably twice as long, maybe longer, than one of the checking phases. I figure localizing a manuscript then duplicating the production workflow would take me about 1-2 months -- of precisely the sort of tedious line-oriented grunt work I most dislike about writing.
So it would have to pay me, at a minimum, 1-2 months' wages above my current income level. Which is quite a lot of money -- and, as noted, there just isn't any commercial incentive to do it.
I might do it anyway if I enjoyed counting grains of sand on a beach, because it's about that interesting. But, frankly, there are more important things I can spend the time on -- like producing an extra book every 3-4 years, or training myself to write prose that works better in audiobook form, because audiobooks are an increasingly large proportion of my income (even though I don't use them).
What would audiobook specificity require?
Voice actors are required to read the text verbatim, as printed. Which means said-bookisms need to be changed, for starters: "he said/she said" tags in dialog should go before the speech, but only be inserted when there's a change of speaker. And it's not good to interrupt dialog with descriptive prose within a sentence, something I habitually do without noticing. Sentences need to be phrased so that the narrator can recite them without having to stop and pant in the middle. And so on. Oh, and forget having aliens with names like d'Hondt. (Joke.)
Training myself to write like this won't make much difference to ebook and p-book readers, but it will make the audiobook experience feel a lot smoother which will ultimately (I hope) lead to better sales.
None of my novels have lapsed from print so I won't be preparing any of them for republication any time soon, but if that ever happens, an edit with audiobook narration in mind will be part of the process.
(As for why it didn't happen previously ... the audiobook market exploded some time in the 2005-2010 time frame. Prior to that point, audiobooks were mostly distributed as fat folios of CDs, and a novel could easily take 8-12 disks! So they were quite expensive. What changed things was the ability to distributed audiobooks online via ebook stores -- the two formats took off at the same time and in parallel. And although audiobooks take longer to listen to than an ebook takes to read, you can't really read while you're driving a daily commute to and from the workplace. While that's not part of my lifestyle it is a major market for readers, and a one hour daily commute each way can easily add up to a novel a week in what would otherwise be dead time.)
"Just out of curiosity, what is the difference between U.K. localized spelling and U.S. localized spelling - other than the occasional word spelled with 'ou' instead of just plain 'o'?" - Lots of USian (mis)spelling is the result of one Noah Webster deliberately changing the spellings of words for no better reason than so that the USian spelling of words was different to the GB spelling.
Well, we DO have highways, but the USA doesn't even have the concept to which they refer (*) :-) I don't even know if highway in Scotland has exactly the same meaning as in England.
(*) Don't ask - it's not worth it, I assure you.
We (the US) has Interstate roads. Which go across the country and are limited access. But we also call state and city roads that are limited access Interstate roads which can confuse people to no end. Especially if it's just a loop or spur.
TBF, the UK (specifically Scotland) does have the A8m which is under 0.25 miles long.
And so on.
Most confusing to me, the first floor in North America is the one at ground level, while in the UK it's the one above the ground floor. I remember that being a (minor) plot point in a mystery book I read late last century.
It was an audiobook that introduced me to you, actually.
I almost never listen to audiobooks, but for some reason I listened to the audiobook version of the Laundry Christmas story. It might have been on the radio, or maybe my computer, but in any case I listened to it and realized that the Laundry series wasn't just horror, but was actually funny. Not liking horror I'd never tried it, but that one story got me hooked.
Still don't listen to audiobooks, but when I read the Laundry series my inner voice still has the accent and intonation of the British voice actor who recorded that story decades ago…
Because UK has highways, in the sense of roads over which central government has some authority, we also have railways rather than railroads. Back in the dream time, we had railroads and they were private affairs found in collieries. From 1825, the public version of railroads became subject to parliamentary approval and the word "railway" came into use. American terminology reflects the engineering rather than the state control.
It wasn't decades ago. And depending where you got it from, the "voice actor" was probably me -- there's never been a commercial audiobook release of that short story but I recorded myself reading it aloud for Tor.com!
Actually, no. That is a very secondary meaning in common usage, and the primary usages are legal, where it doesn't mean that at all. As I said, don't ask - it's not worth it.
I recorded myself reading it aloud for Tor.com!
So when I read a Laundry book I hear the author's voice in my mind? That's so cool.
It seems to be old enough that I can only find a reference with broken links on Tor.com :)
Apparently it used to be freely available on there.
Just when I was going to try an "audiobook" (more like an audioshort) for the first time.
I'm pretty sure I have the original mp3 lying around somewhere ... yup. found it!
Here's my 2011 reading of Overtime. About 49Mb in size, running time 52 minutes, and it's a bit rough because I recorded it in a closet in an old apartment with creaky floors and no sound insulation to speak of. (And this isn't a streaming media server, it's just a file download.)
Charlie Stross @ 16:
Tons of stuff.
We don't have sidewalks, we have pavements. We don't have elevators, we have lifts. We don't have highways, we have A-roads or maybe dual carriageways. We don't have interstates, we have motorways. We don't have theaters, we have cinemas (a theatre is where you go to see a stage play or musical). We don't order carry-out, we have take-aways. You could care less: we couldn't care less. Institutions tend to be singular, not collective nouns (we go to hospital).
And so on.
To make it worse, some shared terms mean different things. A B&B in the USA is not equivalent to a B&B in the UK (this relates to the pre-AirBnB era, though). A driving license in the UK used to refer to an A4 sheet of paper with a list of endorsements on it, but no photograph. (We now get photocard driving licenses too, but the paper record remains.) Oh, and we use cheques, not checks (although they're increasingly rare).
Back in the 90s when I worked in the UK technical publications group of a US multinational, we had an internal manual for helping Brits write and edit US English. It was over 200 pages long (and was used in conjunction with the Chicago Manual of Style). Which, incidentally, gave me a huge advantage when I standardized on writing American(ish) English for my fiction. I'm not perfect, but I had years of training in it that most British authors don't get.
I knew a lot of them already - elevators/lifts, boot/trunk, bonnet/hood, hood/convertible top (I still have an MGB that will be restored someday IF I can ever find a ROUND TUIT) ...
The "driving license" sounds like my DA FORM 348 EQUIPMENT OPERATOR'S QUALIFICATION RECORD (Military driving license). I also had a pocket card I was supposed to carry with me whenever I was operating any military vehicles or equipment. So there should be a few Americans who understand the concept. When I first got my driving license (or "drivers license" here in the U.S.) it didn't include a photo. That came later. Don't remember exactly when that changed.
The Institution/Institutions is kind of a new one, but NOW thinking about it, I'm sure I've seen it before and just skipped over it the same way I did with colour/color ...
I'm surprised some enterprising software programmer hasn't taken that manual, combined it with U.S. & U.K. style manuals and turned it into a program authors on both sides of the Atlantic could use ... sort of like a Spell Check cum Google Translate from English to ENGLISH & vice versa.
Tell the program which side you're on and which side you're writing for and it highlights all the local usages & suggests alternatives; something that would allow an author to go through a text fairly quickly ... but NOT auto-correct (or as I like to call it AUTO-DEFECT).
What's the difference between a B&B in the U.K. and one in the U.S.? I should note that I stayed in several B&Bs in Scotland when I visited in 2004 so I'm not completely clueless ... but I've never stayed in a U.S. B&B so I have no basis for comparison.
paws4thot @ 20:
- Lots of USian (mis)spelling is the result of one Noah Webster deliberately changing the spellings of words for no better reason than so that the USian spelling of words was different to the GB spelling.
Yes, I knew that bit. But it doesn't tell me WHAT changes Noah made.
Also doesn't tell me what usages either side would have difficulty parsing correctly when encountered.
Colour/color just flow right by, but bonnet/boot/hood might not for the average U.S. reader and hood/trunk might confuse the average U.K. reader (convertible top should be self-evident).
I'm surprised some enterprising software programmer hasn't taken that manual, combined it with U.S. & U.K. style manuals and turned it into a program authors on both sides of the Atlantic could use
ROFL!
You cannot trust unconditional search/replace on prose. You always need a human in the loop to hit "yes/no/next" to any suggested change. Otherwise that's how you go from "blackout drapes" to "African-Americanout drapes", or "Scunthorpe" to "Svaginathorpe".
Some of these cross-cultural substitutions turn out to be unfortunately frequent. An American "apartment" is a British "flat", which is how you might end up with a book containing numerous apartmenttering comments.
What's the difference between a B&B in the U.K. and one in the U.S.?
Relative market position? B&B's often used to be quite down-market in the UK -- someone with spare bedrooms just made them available to paying guests on a nightly basis and cooked breakfast, for less than the cost of a hotel room. My understanding is that in the US they tend to be aiming higher, like a pocket-sized boutique hotel.
(AirBnB and changes in the hotel sector completely altered the structure of the short-term letting field.)
I have a neighbor who was born in Scotland a bit over 70 years ago. But he grew up in Hong Kong and many other places. And worked in London, Washinton DC, Silicon Valley, and other parts at various times. He has a son with family in Western PA and a daughter with family in London. So he bounces around a lot. Anywhere from 3 to 5 months a year in England.
He and I have spent the last year with me helping him through a major water leak repair fix up when he was in London for a few months.
I'm constantly asking him to translate some phrase or tool name for me. More than once every 5 minutes most times.
And on the food note I just asked him if he preferred US or English food or if it was just different. His answer was "different".
Wow. Because it turned out that they had to slide which of several novels were coming out to allow RoF Press to get mine out in time for Balticon, so I could have a book launch party (they got it out the day before the con started), I got a copy edit SUNDAY, before the con. (Which was why I had some typos in the published version - I'd never used "accept/reject changes". I'm expecting a longer lead time with my new publisher.
Audiobooks... um. I tend to make clear whose speaking once in a conversation between two people, unless it goes on for a while, so that might be a problem for me, esp. since I really try to avoid "he said/theysaid/he said..." over and over.
And I will try to add expressions, or other body actions, during a conversation, so that would be a problem.
And in 11,000 Years, I have a whole society that has a lot of people with names like B'ham and D'whatsit....
Thanks for the warning.
Um, er, at least for spelling, LibreOffice (and I'm sure Dirt, er, Word) allows you to chose US or UK spelling. (And for some reason, I was typing a post to faceplant, and it tried to make me use the UK spelling).
You have been able to do a lot better than that for many decades now by using even a very simple language-aware translator, but you still get caught by Footrot Apartments (*) or the stage-hands moving apartments between acts, etc. I keep hearing claims of programs that can genuinely parse and comprehend English, but I haven't seen much evidence of them. It's not as if translating USA to UK English (and conversely) is a rare requirement. But, hey!, AI is coming to solve all our problems :-)
(*) https://footrotflats.com/
Why thanks!
That was an interesting experience. Fun to hear the author's voice but both me and the mrs find the accent hard to follow :)
While we both read a lot in english and are perfectly* capable of carrying a spoken conversation in that language, we're not native speakers and we live in a country with subtitled movies. That means, when we don't understand the accent we just read the damn subtitles (which we set to the original english if it's available).
Coupled with me working from home and having a 10 second commute from the bedroom to the office, I think I'll stick to the signed hardcovers.
Amusingly, it includes that Z :)
Actually, the OED spells it "localized". To quote:
"But the suffix itself, whatever the element to which it is added, is in its origin the Greek -ιζειν, Latin -izāre; and, as the pronunciation is also with z, there is no reason why in English the special French spelling should be followed, in opposition to that which is at once etymological and phonetic. In this Dictionary the termination is uniformly written -ize."
16 (OGH): A driving license in the UK used to refer to an A4 sheet of paper with a list of endorsements on it, but no photograph.We last moved house just before that changed, so my licence (note spelling) is still a sheet of paper, though I don't think it's A4. It doesn't expire until my 70th birthday, at which point I will have held that copy for 35 years.
Oh, and we use cheques, not checks (although they're increasingly rare).
True, though curiously enough I wrote one yesterday. The last people to pay me with a cheque were my late in-laws and British Gas, who paid FIT tariffs that way. Now that I've moved to Octopus, the money arrives by direct transfer.
If an American speaker asks an English speaker to "Write someone" they'll be handed a bit of paper with the word "Someone" on it. What they probably meant was to ask them to "Write to someone".
My driving licence is just a card with a photograph (no paper), but I am well over 70, and so have had to renew under the latest system.
Aye, I was aware of that, but nevertheless the S is common enough usage that I perceive it as being by far the more usual spelling, while the Z is a strong indicator of US authorship.
Also, it depends on the word. For instance, nobody writes "compromize" on either side of the ocean, "merchandize" is pretty rare, and "advertize" seems to be well short of universal in the US. On the other hand old writings often use a Z in some most surprizing places. The usage has shifted over time, and some words have been more susceptible than others.
Yes, the Greek suffix had a Z, but Latin had no such letter as Z when I learnt it, and it becomes an S in German too. I suspect the OED of being a touch over-prescriptive here (and have occasionally noticed such a tendency before).
"...a very simple language-aware translator... But, hey!, AI is coming to solve all our problems :-)"
I suspect that Google Translate may have gone into positive feedback through scarfing its own output about "Barclay James Harvest ventilators".
"Write someone" has an implied dative. "Write to someone" makes the action explicit.
Either alas or fortunately, English has mostly lost its inflected forms. For general use, I kind of go with with dumping the inflections and using prefixes and prepositions. Makes sentences longer and often clunkier, but easier to write and understand.
But, of course, the use of inflected forms can make for very subtle and elegant constructions.
Charlie Stross @ 34:
ROFL!
You cannot trust unconditional search/replace on prose. You always need a human in the loop to hit "yes/no/next" to any suggested change. Otherwise that's how you go from "blackout drapes" to "African-Americanout drapes", or "Scunthorpe" to "Svaginathorpe".
That was the point of "... but NOT auto-correct (or as I like to call it AUTO-DEFECT)" - the program could quickly FIND the words, but the author (or editor or proofreader) decides whether to accept a suggested change. Save time on the search.
That's the way I use Spell Check. It identifies words it thinks are misspelled & I correct them if I agree with the suggestion.
Some of these cross-cultural substitutions turn out to be unfortunately frequent. An American "apartment" is a British "flat", which is how you might end up with a book containing numerous apartmenttering comments.
Yeah, I'm just suggesting a program that FINDS cross-cultural substitutions & highlights them for the author's attention might be useful. I am NOT suggesting the substitutions be made automatically for exactly the reasons you point out.
To make it worse, some shared terms mean different things
Yes, don't even mention "thongs". There's a novel by (Australian writer) Nick Earls where one character filmed a handicam Bond parody as a teenager using a thong in lieu of a prop pistol. How do we (Australians) explain this? A localisation (or perhaps internationalisation) could translate it to "flip-flop", but it would lack resonance to a significant extent.
Darn, I'm not going to have time to re-reread the first two New Management books before SoS lands. I had planned to during the two week road trip that just finished, but my wife and I binge watched the (so far) 3 series of Vienna Blood via SBS On Demand a couple of weeks before we left and as a result I've needed to read the novel series by Frank Tallis it's based on. Long story short, travel made reading harder anyway and I'm only about halfway through the second book. I suppose I could just start QoN now, as I've read DLD a few times...
Yeah, I'm just suggesting a program that FINDS cross-cultural substitutions & highlights them for the author's attention might be useful. I am NOT suggesting the substitutions be made automatically for exactly the reasons you point out.
What's the market?
I'm serious about that: this is a highly specialized niche. Novelists don't generally need it, for precisely the reason I explained (why I write/am edited in US English). The only ones who do are childrens' and middle-grade authors, and there's not a lot of money in the field (J. K. Rowling aside). Nobody's going to pay $1000 for a specialist piece of software to automate localization of a novel they're being paid a $2500 advance for. You might sell a dozen copies to publishers, but even they may not cough up for it -- interns are cheap.
Technical publications are largely written in US English to begin with (because: the market) and are increasingly neglected in favour of video tutorials.
Which leaves ...?
And, while such tools improve the reliability of such translations by a large factor, they don't reduce the effort by all that much. I have written some ad-hoc tools, and used them for precisely the former purpose. All right, most of my experience is in doing that on programming language text, but I have also done it on documentation and other text. Such techniques have been known about and used for 60 years, but have never become commodities - there might be a reason for that :-)
I can believe a few people paying that money for such a dialect translation tool, especially if they specialise in pseudo-18th century bodice-rippers (no names, no pack drill), but not enough people to make it worth the effort of creating the database in the first place. As you know but not everyone may, writing the program is easy - it's the translation database that is hard, and every two dialect combinations have to be done separately, and by hand.
Of course, this leads to the increasing Americanisation of English, but that's another rant.
Yes, don't even mention "thongs".
Don't get me started on UK/Aus differences! For starters, just to confuse Americans:
US: Scotch Tape UK: Sellotape Aus: Durex
US: Trojan UK: Durex Aus: ??? (I don't know the most popular brand of condom Down Under)
I can believe a few people paying that money for such a dialect translation tool, especially if they specialise in pseudo-18th century bodice-rippers
Uh-huh.
Regency romance authors and fans are participating in the biggest shared-universe secondary-world fantasy universe and they make hard SF stans of the nit-picking fussy variety look positively disengaged. It's not just Jane Austen fanfic, there are serious history buffs working in it, just as you find the odd astrophysics prof publishing hard SF stories in Analog. And they proofread one another's work before publication.
You can't expect a book editor to spot errors in your hard SF novel's world-building, but it's a different matter for historical fiction.
PS: bodices don't rip. My wife used to make them and they're pretty substantial garments -- at least two layers of fabric, plus boning (often spring steel) and other reinforcement. But you can really annoy American ammosexuals by (accurately) referring to their bulletproof vests as "war corsets".
To make it worse, some shared terms mean different things.
My first engineering manager was a Brit. When he first arrived in Canada he apparently embarrassed himself several times because UK English and Canadian English are different dialects.
Such as asking a secretary for a rubber… (eraser in the UK, condom here)
Then there was the time he'd arranged a social outing and told a female colleague he'd knock her up after work… (knock on her door in the UK, make her pregnant here)
Yes, but my point was that I doubt it's viable even in that forum! The problem isn't single words, but the social conventions on using words (often class-specific), their precise usages, and their use in expressions and idiom. That's what defeated computational linguists in the 1960s and 1970s, and progress has been very slow. ChatGPT's idea of even simple Shakespearean English is woeful, for example.
Thanks for informing me on bodices - it doesn't surprise me that that idiom is nonsensical.
Possible use for AI? "ChatGPT, do you understand the difference between British English and American English?"
"He's probably on a tramp, somewhere." :-)
You're assuming ChatGPT's training data was correctly tagged by dialect. Hint: ChatGPT training data is reportedly tagged by teams of sub-minimum-wage office workers in Nigeria, which has its own unique take on English.
There is another sense of "bunting" which that omits - flying an outside loop in an aircraft. Earliest reference I know is 1930s RAF slang.
(Bunting in this sense is not generally felt to be wise, as the blood is forced to the pilot's head, which is at best unpleasant. The conventional loop is done with the pilot on the inside of the loop, pushing the blood away from the head; which is why modern combat pilots wear G-suits.)
PS: bodices don't rip. My wife used to make them and they're pretty substantial garments -- at least two layers of fabric, plus boning (often spring steel) and other reinforcement. But you can really annoy American ammosexuals by (accurately) referring to their bulletproof vests as "war corsets".
I just checked Google, and yes, tactical cosplay is a thing. So if your wife wants to get into the business of making war corsets for middle-aged American rightwingers of all genders who currently identify as ammosexual, the market on Etsy seems to be hot right now.
I asked ChatGPT: Write first chapter of "The Hobbit" as if Tolkein were an Australian
The results were less than impressive, although I suspect mostly because ChatGPT's guidelines prevent it from writing entire chapters:
G'day mates, let me spin you a yarn about a hobbit by the name of Bilbo Baggins. You see, Bilbo was a bit of an odd bod, living in a burrow in the hills of the Shire, keeping to himself and minding his own business. But one day, things were about to change for old Bilbo.
It all started when a wizard by the name of Gandalf showed up on his doorstep, looking for a place to rest his weary bones. As it turns out, Gandalf had a bit of a proposition for Bilbo. You see, a band of dwarves were on a mission to reclaim their ancestral home in the Lonely Mountain, which had been taken over by a fearsome dragon by the name of Smaug.
Now, Bilbo wasn't exactly the adventuring type, but Gandalf had a feeling that he was just the hobbit for the job. So before Bilbo knew it, he was swept up in a wild adventure that would take him far from the comfort of his burrow and into the heart of danger.
But that's a story for another day, mates. Let's just say that Bilbo's life would never be the same again, and neither would the world around him.
If American <-> English translation can be sometimes baffling, it is of course much worse when foreign languages or contexts are involved. Luckily, American and English SF writers rarely have their characters speak French or venture into France, but when they do, they usually make a mess of it.
Paul McAuley did quite well in "Into Everywhere" (only a few very minor mistakes), but that is almost never the case. Worst offender: Thomas Harris in "Hannibal rising", one would think that a bestseller writer could have had his manuscript checked.
Hmm, maybe because I'm a Trans-Tasman personage but here in Tassie I use Sellotape or sticky tape. The only reference I have for Durex is as American for condoms; as for the Australian for condoms it used to be frangers, but no idea what the Young People call them these days other than condoms. Pretty sure it's not french letter any more either. Some Australians vacuum and some hoover; some use shoe polish and some use kiwi polish (popular brand). This does remind me however of two things I stumbled over in US books. I couldn't work out for a long time if Chinos were shoes or pants and I'm still not sure if a Miltown was a drink or a medication.
Oh yes. American gentleman to Australian lady, in jest:"I'll spank you on the fanny!" Australian to American:"Hell no you won't!" An American fanny is an Australian bum (see: bum bag). An Australian fanny is what Donny likes to grab.
After I returned from my months-long backpacking trip in my early twenties I drove for a shuttle service, where I had a long, mutually incomprehensible discussion with a British lady who asked whether I'd brought "French lettuce" with me on my trip. "Why would I bring French lettuce with me? They certainly let it through Australian customs."
Finally she explained that "French Lettuce" meant "condoms" and I eventually figured out that her particular accent didn't pronounced the "r" in "letters," and that's how I learned the term.
... Feh. "Certainly won't let it through Australian customs."
"Henry Look at her, a prisoner of the gutter,
Condemned by every syllable she ever uttered.
By law she should be taken out and hung,
For the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue.
Eliza Aaoooww! Henry imitating her Aaoooww!
Heaven's! What a noise!
This is what the British population,
Calls an elementary education. Pickering Oh,
Counsel, I think you picked a poor example. Henry Did I?
Hear them down in Soho square,
Dropping "h's" everywhere.
Speaking English anyway they like.
You sir, did you go to school?
Man Wadaya tike me for, a fool?
Henry No one taught him 'take' instead of 'tike!
Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?
This verbal class distinction, by now,
Should be antique. If you spoke as she does, sir,
Instead of the way you do,
Why, you might be selling flowers, too!
Hear a Yorkshireman, or worse,
Hear a Cornishman converse,
I'd rather hear a choir singing flat.
Chickens cackling in a barn Just like this one!
Eliza Garn! Henry I ask you, sir, what sort of word is that?
It's "Aoooow" and "Garn" that keep her in her place.
Not her wretched clothes and dirty face.
Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?
This verbal class distinction by now should be antique.
If you spoke as she does, sir, Instead of the way you do,
Why, you might be selling flowers, too.
An Englishman's way of speaking absolutely classifies him,
The moment he talks he makes some other
Englishman despise him.
One common language I'm afraid we'll never get.
Oh, why can't the English learn to set
A good example to people whose
English is painful to your ears?
The Scotch and the Irish leave you close to tears.
There even are places where English completely
Disappears. In America, they haven't used it for years!
Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?
Norwegians learn Norwegian; the Greeks have taught their
Greek. In France every Frenchman knows
His language fro "A" to "Zed"
The French never care what they do, actually,
As long as they pronounce in properly.
Arabians learn Arabian with the speed of summer lightning.
And Hebrews learn it backwards,
Which is absolutely frightening.
But use proper English you're regarded as a freak.
Why can't the English,
Why can't the English learn to speak?"
Thanks to Lerner and Lowe.
It's sometimes hard from someone like me, born in the 1960s, to understand/remember just how hard-hitting a satire that was!
Fun to hear the author's voice but both me and the mrs find the accent hard to follow :)
I’ve got an interesting story about that. I don’t normally “hear” a spoken voice when I read. But years ago I got to hear Charlie read a bit from Rule 34 ahead of getting the full printed book. When I finally did get the dead tree edition, I soon came to the section I’d heard before – and suddenly the text had a Scottish accent!
Spoiler: I don't have a Scottish accent. (I am weirdly incapable of doing any accent other than the one I was issued with in my early years -- I have difficulty recognizing them -- and I speak something close to BBC English, aka Pronounced RP.)
Personal account - Having spent time talking to Charlie, I can agree that he does not have a Scots (particularly he does not have an Embra) accent, nor indeed does he have a noticably Yorkshire accent.
To my American ears Charlie sounds like he has a BBC accent with a very slight Scottish overlay. He sounds highly educated, but you can also tell what country he's from.
Not just Tassie. I've never heard of a sticky tape brand called Durex, I assume someone was borrowing Charlie's sense of humour. While sticky tape is the general term that most people use, you hear people using brand names generically too, including Scotch tape, Sellotape, Magic Tape (which is a Scotch product I believe) and also specific purpose names like masking tape or packing tape. Tearable plasticised fabric tape is usually called gaffer tape no matter what the industry, and likewise thin plastic tape is usually called electrical tape while wide plastic tape is called duct tape.
One brand-name-as-generic-name that people overseas might find amusing is Glad Wrap, the most common brand and also the generic name for cling film in Australia. I have no idea whether the apparently widespread usage of cling film by teenagers all over the western world as a surrogate condom is just an urban legend. When I was a teenager at the height of the AIDS epidemic, condoms were plentiful and easy to acquire so no such hijinks were required.
AFAIK the most common brand of condoms here is still Ansell, though Durex isn't unknown and given we're suffused in US culture via the usual soft imperialism, totally understood by pretty much anyone to refer to that. In fact due to the latter, I've no idea which slang words for condoms in general use are in fact native, if any. All the ones mentioned above are commonly understood if not actually used here.
When I heard you speaking (YouTube of conference speech I think) I didn't previously know much about Leeds so I sort of assumed that's how people there speak. On the other hand, if Leeds is more or less the same thing as "Yorkshire" speech-wise, I've watched enough James Herriot adaptations to know you don't talk like that. So at a guess I'd have said RP inflected with something, where the something could easily be personal rather than regional.
I personally have an unusual example of genetically-inflected accent. I was reared in country Queensland and grew up in inner city Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne and would otherwise have a fairly standard cultivated (RP-aligned) Australian accent. I didn't meet my biological father till I was about 30, but nonetheless inherit some speech patterns from him that to many/most Australians make me sound English (he was born in Brisbane himself, though his father grew up on a farm in County Durham before emigrating to Australia to become a Methodist minister). To Brits I sound Australian. Same for most Americans, other than a handful I've met who had an exceptionally good ear for accents, for whom mine was confusing.
The Australian accent (of which there are really two, cultivated and broad, those being largely class-based although this is far from consistent), is unusually homogeneous across the entire continent and apparently became so within a very short time after British settlement. The fact that the similar accent across the Tasman is recognisably slightly different could be the most significant reason they didn't join in at Federation.
Charlie Stross @ 48:
What's the market?
I'm serious about that: this is a highly specialized niche. Novelists don't generally need it, for precisely the reason I explained (why I write/am edited in US English). The only ones who do are childrens' and middle-grade authors, and there's not a lot of money in the field (J. K. Rowling aside). Nobody's going to pay $1000 for a specialist piece of software to automate localization of a novel they're being paid a $2500 advance for. You might sell a dozen copies to publishers, but even they may not cough up for it -- interns are cheap.
Does it have to be a commercial product? There's a lot of good, useful free "open source" software out there that isn't made for a profit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software
SHOULD someone do it? I dunno, but I am surprised it hasn't been done already.
Sighs. Are you really trying to tell the Perl programmer/author of Accelerando/ex-start-up dude about Open Source software?
~Retreats thirty miles, dons radiation suit, and makes popcorn.~
Does it have to be a commercial product? There's a lot of good, useful free "open source" software out there that isn't made for a profit.
Well, even "open source" software needs somebody to make it. Even to write ChatGPT prompts and debug the resulting code... Also many big "open source" projects are paid by various companies anyway - there's a difference in doing software as a hobby and as, well, a job.
This is kind of a niche product, as Charlie already said. This limits the people who would even want to work on such a product: you don't work on a hobby project if it's not relevant to you, and for companies there's again the same money problem as with "closed source". (Though it'd be even less money, probably, as not many institutions pay for "open source" software they use.)
Also this is not just a programming exercise. Doing cross-cultural translations is a very different skill from software development and at least I'd like to have people who would know how to do that. See again the "relevant to you" thing.
I work in software development and do some fun hobby projects on my free time. Still this is something I'd think is not trivial even if somebody would pay me (and a team) to make it.
There are simpler, very useful "open source" projects, which to my understanding never really progress anywhere; for example the accessibility additions for PDFs produced by LaTeX. Probably not that hard to implement but you need to know how to do those and be motivated enough to put in the effort. Still hasn't been done.
My favourite open source project that falls squarely into the sweet spot of what you describe here is a piece of software called Lilypond, which is a compiler for a markup language, a little like TeX, but for sheet music typesetting. It was started by two dutch computer scientists who also happened to be classical musicians in their non-day-job lives, who share an interest in and love for traditional music engraving. It seems to produce very pleasing results just by dint of people with an interest deep diving into an obscure subject. The user community is limited, because you sort of need to be a mathematician, physicist, statistician or programmer to be really comfortable using it, but there are IDEs for it and it's very easy to add into an existing one (I currently use it on MacOSX with BBEdit but in the past have used it on Windows and Linux).
This project sounds like the sort of thing that would be challenging to get up as open source. There's a naive solution that involves a database of one-to-one mappings, and that would not be supportable or sustainable in the long term. The correct solution requires an ontology, which would require active curation. That's quite possible with a big-enough community of contributors: even better the contributors would not need to be programmers. But I'm not sure I see where that community would come from. The good news is that you could probably implement the ontology with off the shelf software, but the problem is building out the ontology and then also a terminology database of localisations to go with it. Once you have those things, that's when the natural language processing tools come into it. Referring to OGH's work, how does your software know to kick in when Bob says "the Johnny fell off" and not and some other time when Bob refers to Mr Depp losing his footing on a tightrope?
Google suggests this might be the closest to an off-the-shelf FOSS tool, but there's a lot of work to do with it just to get started...
Spoiler: I don't have a Scottish accent. ... I speak something close to BBC English, aka Pronounced RP.
True in Edinburgh, I'm sure. Thousands of kilometers away in Portland Oregon, it'll do.
We're suckers almost any voice from the British Isles. I think I've mentioned that a woman from Nottingham worked at one of our convention hotels for a few years; people would hang around the front desk just listening to her talk.
See #49. Writing such a program is easy; almost all the work is in generating the database, and that needs a LOT of effort by skilled people. 'Skilled' in this context means that they are highly literate in both dialects. That's the killer.
Way back when (1970s), and at times since, I have wanted to write a GOOD diagnostic key program for British plants - e.g. one that you didn't need to have flowers to identify plants, when other information was adequate. Writing the program would have taken only a day or so, but I always failed because I couldn't find a source of the data.
Sighs. Are you really trying to tell the Perl programmer/author of Accelerando/ex-start-up dude about Open Source software?
I once saw someone direct a "You don't really understand the GNU public license" protest at someone trying to explain the subject to newbies. I noticed that the original author was posting under the name rstallman and could see how that was going to play out.
"The Australian accent (of which there are really two, cultivated and broad, those being largely class-based although this is far from consistent), is unusually homogeneous across the entire continent and apparently became so within a very short time after British settlement."
I'd argue not. There are (as everywhere) regional variations in accent - usually you can tell if someone's from Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne etc and while regional accents can be quite broad, usually you can get a feel from which state they are from as well.
We're suckers almost any voice from the British Isles.
Yes: and it's also the go-to accent for Hollywood movie villains this century (at least in productions where the villain's ethnicity is not dictated by the setting and familiar to the middle-American audience). I don't know why, it just is. I guess my alternative career track would be voice actor for cartoon villains?
Charlie @ 81
What about me then?
As you know, my speech is even more "clipped" & RP than yours ... usually.
I might grant you Adelaide, but I'd suggest even that is governed more by a cultivated vs broad class-related dynamic.
HEADDESK!
On usenet, circa 1992, one October (the month after September: this is a Clue) I got to witness an irritated American undergrad blow into sci.space and try to school Henry Spencer about the history of the Apollo missions.
(Yes, that Henry Spencer, the one who visited KSC and was given a ride in the back seat of one of one of NASA's SR-71s when he visited because his fans there wanted to show their appreciation...)
The very next week the same name popped up on comp.sci.crypt where he proceeded to tell Bruce Schneier that he didn't know what he was talking about wrt. how PKI works.
What about me then? As you know, my speech is even more "clipped" & RP than yours ... usually.
Aren't you going to be cast as the wizard? Subtle or outright mad, as the script requires.
Do you already have robes? How about a staff with a knob on the end?
See also the origin of Mansplaining.
From the wikipedia article: Solnit told an anecdote about a man at a party who said he had heard she had written some books. She began to talk about her most recent, on Eadweard Muybridge, whereupon the man cut her off and asked if she had "heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year"—not considering that it might be (as, in fact, it was) Solnit's book
I blame Peter Cushing in the original Star Wars movie. He set the pattern of Imperial officers having English accents in the series.
Yes: and it's also the go-to accent for Hollywood movie villains this century (at least in productions where the villain's ethnicity is not dictated by the setting and familiar to the middle-American audience). I don't know why, it just is. I guess my alternative career track would be voice actor for cartoon villains?
Something I've thought about more than trivially.
Big Hollywood movies don't want subtitles for more than a few sentences if that. They are a killer for the US audiences most of the time.
Most of the movie going (and paying) planet speaks English (of some variety) as a first or second language.
Many movie villains come from Russia/USSR/Slavic backgrounds. French and Italian accents wouldn't do.
So Hollywood goes with UK accents for the bad guys. Especially Scottish for Russians. (The Hunt for Red October is a big one there.)
Such techniques have been known about and used for 60 years, but have never become commodities
I spent a few hours last night enjoying the night air and refreshments with 3 other folks. One was a native of NC with strong Scottish roots, one born in Scotland but spent much of his growing up in some former colonies and then working in England an the US in tech. And the other a native of Australia for all of his early life but in the US for years now. (We are all a bit past 65.)
Anyway, we were all using nouns every few minutes that while valid in all the variations of English had very different meanings to each of us. The meaning was mostly clear to all of us due to context but without the context our default definition would be different for each of us in just reading the word by itself.
Plus the idioms tossed around just to make it more fun.
Especially Scottish for Russians. (The Hunt for Red October is a big one there.)
Pedantically, most of the Russian officers on the Red October had English accents. Ramius was Lithuanian (IIRC, one of the Baltics anyway) so had a different accent.
The ambassador? And others?
But the main point is they were obviously not "Merican". Tim Curey, Sidney Edmond Jocelyn Ackland, Sam Neill, and a few others.
Netflix is big on doing lots of language translations for their in house movies and series. (Just watch the credits at the end of anything they do.) I wonder how well they are done? Is it spaghetti western quality or do the lips seem to actually be in sync?
As a side note on this movie. My brother pointed out to me that NONE of the control room instruments on the RO had labels on them. Well maybe a few but most were just lights and dials with no indication of what they were for. I'm sure it saved a bit of money not to try and get them right.
Russian. Scottish. Damn commies, the lot of them.
I have some odd brain wiring which means I partly lip-read and struggle to rely on audio only so avoid dubbed films and TV and can't comment on Netflix. If I can't get original language with English subtitles I tend to skip the production.
A long time ago I worked for an ex Royal Navy submarine officer and watched Hunt For Red October with him a couple of times (his wife restricted how often he could watch it as he'd get all nostalgic) and he always praised the accuracy of the procedures on the boats. Don't remember him mentioning the lack of labels...
My brother also said it was a fairly accurate movie to his understanding.
He worked on shore doing sonar algorithms and weapons integrations. (He has some interesting stories on the first time a dozen or few contracts get together with the first bread boarded stuff for a new system. Specs have lots of cracks.)
In a conversation during a drive this weekend my son in law was discussing a former co-worker with 20+ years in the US Navy. Mostly in subs. One comment he made was most submariners have at least one broken bone, back, or skull fracture. This guy had his neck broken as he wasn't using the handrail walking through the sub when they got hit by an underwater wave. He got to spend a few months in a hospital at the nearest decent port.
Troutwaxer @ 74:
Sighs. Are you really trying to tell the Perl programmer/author of Accelerando/ex-start-up dude about Open Source software?
~Retreats thirty miles, dons radiation suit, and makes popcorn.~
No, simply trying to point out that there IS a lot of good, useful NON-COMMERCIAL software out there that doesn't cost thousands of dollars. Anyone can use it if they need it or not use it if it doesn't suit their needs.
I thought the idea might be useful & I'm surprised someone hasn't done it already. And even if it's not a commercially viable product that doesn't mean someone hasn't or couldn't produce it.
PS: It was just an idea. No one is forced to use it if they don't find it useful.
Yes, the "Vilnius schoolmaster" did indeed have a Scots (specifically Edinburgh) accent in the film.
I have a number of French speakers in my first, and next novel. I went out of my way to try to keep the accent correct and consistent (and not overwhelming).
I thought the idea might be useful & I'm surprised someone hasn't done it already.
It's simply not the sort of problem that appeals to programmers.
To reach any significant audience you'd need to tie it into Microsoft Office (which is a strike against the open source developer's motivational coolness factor), or accept a radically smaller user base by going for LibreOffice, Scrivener, or UNIX command line tools. In the latter two cases, interoperability with Word would be a horrendous obstacle (Scriv has a very unconventional view of what a book is, and along with the UNIX command line stuff would require stripping and then adding back in all the formatting and other metadata).
The software itself would be extremely dull -- you've met standalone grammar and spelling checkers? -- and its effectiveness would be 95% dependent on the rules and dictionary knowledge base, which is not the sort of thing programmers excel at -- it's really a localization support tool, and a highly specialized one at that (because rather than localizing from language A into language B it needs to handle dialects and vernacular differences within a language).
(G) I heard, back in the late nineties, about a conference where a M$ honcho was onstage, and talking how they had implemented the Korn shell in NT. An older man stood up, nad complained that it was not fully there. The honcho tried to disagree... until someone else stood up and noted that he was arguing with Dr. Korn.
Perhaps... but my late ex, who was ex-USN, and worked in COMOCEANSYSLANT (sp?), told me they all laughed at the movie. Oh... and that they could track one Soviet sub because the samovar in the break room was very noisy.
Actually, it strikes me as being an add-on to Calibre, which does translate books from one format to another.
"(because rather than localizing from language A into language B it needs to handle dialects and vernacular differences within a language)."
...which means that for every single bit in the database, there will be a thousand-post thread somewhere of people arguing whether it should be 1 or 0 and still not getting any nearer to an answer.
SS @ 86
Outright mad, please, & robes, yes { Well ankle-length black cloak, with full hood, & scarlet lined } & staff ( with "knob" ) I have two or three ...
I'm wondering about bringing my quarterstaff to Glasgow, except for the "security" problems, given our recent law changes.
No, no, no, it's a walking stick, as Gandalf said to Theoden's gate guards....
Bought, d/l, and sitting on my ancient Nook, waiting to be read.
whitroth
EXACTLY
started reading...
Many many years ago I had the exact same cognitive WTF that Evelyn experiences early on, although at the real location. "this place looks strangely familiar..."