editorial advice please

I am finishing up a translation (French to English) about the history of a mountain observatory in the French Pyrenees. The book is mainly for the Franch market, but the publisher will also publish a few hundred books in English. I presume most of the English books will be sold in the shop at the observatory, open to visitors and tourists since 2000, so the customers will be either British or other English-speaking Europeans.

There is also a plan to market to observatories or amateur astronomers in the USA. There is certainly no market for a wide readership in N America.

I would appreciate your opinions on whether I should use British or American English. The American person reading for me claims it should be in US English, with all the meters transated to feet ("no American will know how high 3000 meters is"), and certain terms expressed in an American way. Who gets upset more -- Brits seeing US spelling or Americans seeing (and not understanding?) British spelling?

Would USA readers expect terms like "one-meter telescope" to be translated into "39-inch telescope"?

Also, after looking at several non-fiction books as well as the NYRB, I left the names of various institutions, like Institut Pasteur, in French. In the case of a state body with a common acronym, like CNRS, I translated the first time, and left it like that subsequently. Our American correspondent claims the books won't sell if there are words in French and that I should translate everthing, like Bureau National de Météorologie into National Meteorological Office.

Do any of you have an opinion or 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.

the equivalent amount in euros

presumably after correction for inflation. Inflation from 1880 to today in Britain is about 50 times, which makes that 12/- wage worth only £30 today, a reminder of how poor people were in those days compared to today.

There are two inflation comparison methods:
http://www.measuringworth.com/ppoweruk/
According to that site, 12 shillings in 1880 was in 2012 terms (the latest year they give) £50.60 using the retail price index, £263.00 using average earnings.

There are not many farm labourers around these days, but I see the average weekly wage for a typist is £18,486 a year, according to this site:
http://www.reed.co.uk/average-salary/admin-secretarial-pa/typist
Divided by 52, that works out to £355.50 a week.

The amount in euros is given to provide an order of magnitude of expenses, but any mentions of salaries, for example, are comparisons with workers or farm labourers at the time.

Of course it's meaningless to give an exact equivalence because of inflation as well as the change in French currency in 1960 -- 100 francs became 1 new franc,

Another North American here, voting with the posters above who recommend the use of metric. It makes no sense to me to use measurements that will be easily understood by only a tiny percentage of your book's readers. Let them read what's between the parentheses.

If the book is mainly to be sold in France to tourists, it would be weird to use American English, no?

I'm agreeing with all the posters, too. Your work is European. There is no shame in using british spellings and metric measures.

Personally, as an engineer who has worked in the US and in Europe, I see the imperial measurement system as a mind-rotting plague, based on an historical mistake that has turned out to be too difficult to correct in the US for a lot of reasons (eg, "it's a communist plot") that aren't worth delving into here. We shouldn't encourage its continued use (except maybe in golf, where 2-foot putts sound better than 60-centimeter putts).

If the book is mainly to be sold in France to tourists, it would be weird to use American English, no?

Is it known that every place in France gets more British tourists than USAnian?

Is it known that every place in France gets more British tourists than USAnian?

Seems like a pretty safe bet (a known unknown as someone famously said). Possible exception: the US Embassy in Paris.

Is it known that every place in France gets more British tourists than USAnian?

I'd hazard a guess that France gets more people who speak British English than American English, even if they aren't British. That is, most of those "other English-speaking Europeans" were probably taught British English.

Well, nutrax in school we're taught british english, but where I live we had a lot of american soldiers and before 9/11 they were out in our economy much more than british speaking people, my ex even had to translate british english into american english in London for me, so my friends and I are more likely to use american english.

Sorry, for the OT bjd, use british english in your translation.

I see that 3.3 USAnians visited France last year, but I'm having trouble finding the number of Brits who did.

textibule, a "known unknown" isn't a safe bet. It's something that you know you don't know. The number of Brits who visited France last year is for me a known unknown.

For a friend of mine, the fact that a pangolin walks on its hind legs was an unknown unknown until the other day. She had never heard of pangolins, so she didn't know that she didn't how their manner of locomotion.

3.3 USAnians? Was that two guys and a woman in her first trimester of pregnancy?

3.3 million, compared to almost 9 million Brits, apparently.

Thanks.

In 2011, there were 12,378,000 "Tourist arrivals" from residents of the UK. There were also 4,737,000 day trips made from the UK (i.e. no overnight stay). There were 3,325,000 arrivals from US residents. There were also over a million day trips. I can't imagine doing a genuine day trip from the US, so my guess would be most were long layovers where someone cleared immigration & spent a few hours in Paris or something.

83% of 2012 visitors were from Europe. There were 1.4 Chinese visitors in 2012.

(from an English publication of the French tourism directorate and news reports of the 2012 edition).

A day trip by a US resident need not be a day trip from the US. It could be a day trip from Britain or Germany or Belgium etc.

Vinny,

With all due respect, from where I sit in the SW of France, there are zillions of Brits who live here or pass through regularly. There are (just) a handful of Americans living here (myself included), and the occasional today-is-tuesday-this-must-be-France tourist coming through rapidly on the way to somewhere else. It's just not the same demographic, believe me.

Use a little bit of each, randomly and annoy as many people as possible.

One day us dyslexics will rule the world.

Another vote for British English. Though I like zashibis's suggestion to add conversions into imperial units where it makes sense. "3000m (about 10,000 ft)," etc.

The impression I get on this forum and others is that the British still use imperial measures quite a bit, e.g. when giving driving distances or their height and weight It may be because the forums I read atract an older crowd.

I still vote for using metric though.

Vinny #24, that's not quite right. Inside the Schengen zone, which includes Germany and Belgium (but not Britain), there are no border controls at all. So an American citizen visiting France for a day from Germany or Belgium wouldn't be noticed (or counted).

Vinny #28, that's right. I grew up in Britain in the 60's and 70's and have lived in mainland Europe for over 20 years, but I still judge people's height in feet and inches. Apart from that I'm fully metric, I think.

I hadn't thought of that, Tony at #29. Obviously.

Sorry that I seem to have disappeared -- I was away for a few days. Thanks for your contributions, everyone. I have indeed decided to use British spelling, metric systems as per your recommandations.

Does the USA call it the "imperial" system?

Edited by: bjd to ask Textibule where he lives since we have no PMs.

Bjd, I live near Albi in the Tarn. You can email me @gmail.com if you don't mind the NSA listening in.

Does the USA call it the "imperial" system?

Most Americans probably wouldn't have a name for it, and many are probably unaware of the Imperial system. . "The US system, you know, not metric"

Formally, it's the "US customary system." US units aren't always the same as Imperial units. For example, an Imperial quart = 1.2 US quarts.

I think of heights and weights in metric, but know what it means if someone is 6 feet tall or weighs 180 lbs.

Canada converted temperatures to Celsius back in the 1970s, but some newspapers or radio stations will still give the Fahrenheit equivalent. I just had a look at the CBC website (Canadian Broadcasting Corp.) and they give only Celsius.