editorial advice please

This is the sort of thing I often have to deal with at work (in Israel, where we have native English speakers from all over: the US, Britain, Australia...). Younger Australians apparently don't know feet and inches.

To say "no American will know how high 3000 meters is" is implying that all Americans are idiots and don't know how to look this up or use a conversion table.

Since the topic of the book is fairly specialized (or specialised) you can assume that the readers will be reasonably intelligent and interested in the topic - it's not an airport novel, after all.

As for the one-meter telescope, if that is a standard measure for telescopes (about which I know nothing), I wouldn't convert it. For comparison, TV screens are measured in inches, even in countries that don't habitually use inches. A 27-inch TV doesn't need to be converted into centimeters (or centimetres).

For the French institutions, could you have a page at the beginning or end of the book with translations, and in the body of the text refer to the institutions by their French names? I don't think anyone would have difficulty figuring out that Bureau National de Météorologie is National Meteorological Office anyway, since all the words are pretty much the same and "bureau" is used in English anyway and won't be an outlandish term: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics / U.S. Census Bureau / U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) ... I can't imagine any American freaking out at the use of Bureau even left untranslated from French!

It would be a lot harder if the book was in German!

Thanks, Shuffaluff. I too figured that anyone buying a book about an observatory would know about metric measurements. And the one mention of Mt Palomar talks of a "60-inch telescope".

So what do you do in Israel -- use British spelling or American?

I think the kindest thing is to write eg, "3172m (10,407 ft)". But to beware of spurious accuracy and write "3000m (about 10,000 ft)" not "3000m (9843ft)" when it is evident that one means about 3000m, not exactly 3000m.

A common error in texts translated from French is to see 3172m (967ft), ie to make the conversion in the wrong direction.

Is the 1m telescope exactly 1000mm? If so one can write 39.37in to make clear the level of accuracy. If not, better to write 1m (about 40in) to make clear the approximation.

I once had to write a report concerning a six-inch naval gun under an overriding requirement to write in metric. It turned out that the gun wasn't exacly six inches in bore anyway. Thus we interpreted Six Inch Gun as being its name and wrote it like that, rather than any nonsense about 152.4mm gun (exactly 6 inches), or 150mm gun (about 6 inches), or whatever its exact measurement was.

Fyi, 1 inch is defined as exactly 25.4mm, on which basis you can make perfectly accurate conversions, whereas conversion factors such as 1m = 3.281ft aren't exact at is a non-terminating decimal.

The height of the mountain is only mentioned once, so the exact altitude would be given, as well as the conversion into feet in parentheses.

My concern is more with having to write "one-metre" or "one-meter telescope", not the exact dimension.

This American thinks your American corespondent is absolutely cuckoo.

Surely, the vast majority of English-speaking visitors at this observatory would be versed in British English, not American. And, just as surely, any American tourists arriving in the high Pyrenees--or, alternatively, sufficiently interested in a small observatory in the Pyrenees to buy a book about it--would be sophisticated not to flummoxed by references to the metric system or untranslated names of foreign schools and government bodies. I hate it when proper names are translated or otherwise Anglicized.

I'm actually a supporter of America's quaint system of measurements (no doubt because even after many, many years abroad, I still "think in Fahrenheit") but this strikes me as ridiculous. Use the metric system, British spellings, and the French names, and forget about inserting distracting conversions in parentheses.

What zashibis and the others said. The book is about something in Europe and will mostly be sold in Europe. Many of the Americans arriving there will have gotten there on roads with speed limits and distances given in metric; we can assume that nonetheless they survived and found the place.

Who gets upset more -- Brits seeing US spelling or Americans seeing (and not understanding?) British spelling?

Judging from book reviews, the Brits get more upset. I never see an American reviewer complaining about a translation into British English, but British reviewers always seem to warn readers if a translation uses "gotten" or "elevator".

Okay -- thanks everyone. That's pretty well what I wanted to hear and have confirmed. I won't tell the American guy he is cuckoo though.

I've been out all day and just come back to see how the thread has grown! I'm British, but to be honest I hardly notice American spellings any more, since I've got(ten) so used to them. In my personal correspondence I use British spelling, but I don't make a whole song and dance about things that are in American spelling. It's spelled or spelt the way it is, and I can live with it!

As Vinny says, it's not as if meters/metres are so outlandish that Americans won't have the faintest idea what you are talking about. If it was an obscure pre-revolutionary Russian measure of length, or an old Turkish land measurement, you would need to provide an explanation. Yes, Israel uses old Turkish land measurements! This is something that dates back to Ottoman times. The dunam has been updated to its metric equivalent and is now one-tenth of a hectare. A house in Israel might be on a half-dunam plot. That would need to be explained in a translation, especially as I have not found the word in any dictionary or online conversion table..

Off-topic, but I am much more incensed by "converting" pre-decimal sums of money (sterling) into the present-day equivalent, when of course it's nothing of the kind. For those who don't know, until 1971 the UK used pounds, shillings and pence: 12 pence to a shilling, 20 shillings to a pound. (Pity the poor primary-school children of my generation who had to work out complicated sums, buying 15 articles at sevenpence ha'penny each, how much change from five pounds?) Then when the UK went decimal, 100 pence to the pound, one shilling became 5p. But a shilling in those days - more than I was ever allowed to spend on an ice cream, or the fare for a longish bus ride - is obviously not the equivalent of 5p today. A farm labourer who earned 12 shillings a week in 1880 was reasonably well off by the standards of his time and class. To say in a book about life in the 1880s "12 shillings (60p)" is insanity.

Actually, the book does mention quite a few sums of money in francs because it is a history of 100 years at this observatory and mentions construction, salaries of porters, etc. There are footnotes with the equivalent amount in euros to give an idea when it is a large amount, but it's not in the text itself.

Shuffaluff, I was born in England and went to school there for a few years. I remember not only £.s.d. but having to learn the 12x multiplication table.