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Comment by bloak | Hacker News Reader

That's cultural imperialism, I suppose.

I'm guessing it's not really about the original language: those Swedish crime novels that sell well in English translation are also sold in German translation, right? But if the book doesn't appeal to UK/US readers then it won't get translated from German into French, say? (I'm just guessing: please correct me if I'm wrong.)

The last German novel I encountered as a popular book in English translation was "Die Vermessung der Welt" / "Measuring the world". The first German science fiction that comes to my mind ... "Die Haarteppichknüpfer" (great book from 1995): no idea if it sold well in English. Science fiction, like crime fiction, seems like it ought to be something that crosses borders quite easily. So why doesn't it?

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It applies to English too, if you are using anything but US English.

I find it wearing and tedious. I used to love reading US books - with different spelling, idioms, habits, social expectations, and the odd phrase or word I'd never come across. Then revert to British books, read the odd German translation etc. I'd read a Nordic crime novel because it's not set in a quiet English village, Chicago or London, and things are done differently. Apparently that's not permitted by publishers any more, unless you're as lucrative as JK Rowling or T Pratchett.

Many British recent novels, and just about all recent sci-fi are written in American. Not just spelling, but a book set in 1930s London, with a London character who we've just been told lived in the East End all their life, will talk about the sidewalk, the trunk and hood, and such. All judges will use gavels - regardless that in the UK, only an auctioneer uses a gavel, no court possesses one. This sort of thing gets especially silly with things like the Laundry Files - it's parodying Britain, its culture and its systems, yet talking in "Yank".

I've read a few different Nordic crime novels where not only are they written in American, they are culturally appropriated to be set in a virtual USA, called Sweden (or Norway, etc...). Suddenly the Nordic countries have district attourneys, US police hierarchies, US court systems and such. This is particularly grating.

I don't understand why. It ruins far more books than it helps. Above all, I don't believe it would put off US buyers to read of a few places doing things strangely or talking funny.

> All judges will use gavels - regardless that in the UK, only an auctioneer uses a gavel, no court possesses one.

Not true - for example Inner London Crown Court.

Really?

https://www.judiciary.uk/about-the-judiciary/the-justice-sys...

Edit: LOL. According to "Inappropriate Gavels" @ Twitter, they do indeed, but they're not used at all by the judge. They're the one court where clerks use a gavel to signal the judge's arrival. Still, I stand (partially) corrected. :)

Yes, really. I didn’t say a judge used them - you said no court possesses one, and they do.

This is the best kind of internet pedantry and I appreciate that you took the time to inform us of this.

It sometimes depends on the printing. Books printed for the US market will use hood, trunk etc. Books printed for the UK and Australian markets will use bonnet, boot etc.

If you buy online there's a good chance you'll get the US printing because it's usually the cheapest.

I don't think British characters speaking American English is any stranger than characters in a fantasy setting speaking a real-world language. In both cases I assume it's translated for the convenience of the reader. I'm a native British English speaker, but American English is more common so I prefer reading it because that's what I'm accustomed to.

It's the homogenisation I regret as it's so limiting.

PG Wodehouse and F Scott Fitzgerald probably wouldn't have lasted half as well had the writing been sanitised to some mid Atlantic generic English and humour first. Those archaic and now slightly odd idioms mattered in setting the scene and time. Douglas Adams, always highly reluctant to meet deadlines, might never have got beyond the radio series had his editor required an Americanisation pass. The books would have been far weaker for it. Puzo (The Godfather) would be ruined rendered into British.

Which is not to say I object to a Brit character using Americanisms in their English, we all do that, and vice versa. I just like characters and things to stay believable in a book's particular time and context, which increasingly they seem not to. In making them overly (US or world English) generic I find more that somehow feel out of place in their alleged setting.

I highly recommend if you're looking for diversity and the avoidance of americanization, I would recommend looking beyond the UK settings and into fiction inspired by or taking place in other parts of the world. Speculative fiction has had an explosion of culturally diverse and distint cultural nods lately- The Daevabad Trilogy by Chakraborty for example, or Lagoon by Okorafor, or the Dreamblood Duology by Jemisin, or The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu.

In my opinion it isn't that books aren't increasingly becoming more american. Books are increasingly globally set, from where I'm reading. (Of course, this may not be the case in non-speculative fiction sphere.)

It drives me crazy when I read fiction books which use Fahrenheit (and sometimes don't even specify units) as I don't understand that measurement or many other imperial units at all. One would think in this day and age that authors could use some semantic markup and one's e-reader could use the reader's preferences to format the book for easier understanding/comprehension

The Laundry Files don't sound Yank at all. They sound exactly like someone who might write for (or comment on) The Register, to the point that I ended up googling to see if Charles Stross had anything to do with the BOFH. It's very close version of a cynical British tech geek.

The books focusing on his wife are more American, but then she IS American, so...

The early ones certainly aren't, they're just about pitch perfect. Somewhere mid way, probably around The Annihilation Score, they become so and it starts to feel off, in part because the perfect pitch has become off key. That's entirely ignoring Labyrinth Index centred on Mhari, as it's the weakest book of the series, for its own reasons.

Merchant Princes, set somewhat in the US, gets the pitch of place and character, and keeps it, much more consistently.

The Annihilation Score is a pretty good skewering of modern bureaucracy; we've borrowed a lot of terminology from the Americans and imported a lot of their corporate thinking, so it makes sense that the tone shifts. And again, that book is a Mo book, and she's American.

Not saying there is any problem with an American sounding American in any book. The problem is specifically with the other, non-American characters and their change in tone sounding unreal in the context of a Britain that has adopted many of those US empty corporate cliches, along with a few of our own.

Like I already said, I got no problem with Brits using Americanisms - we all do that.

Without going away to reskim it for quotes, which I'm not going to do, I think we have to agree to differ. :p

Seems more like basic economics than 'cultural imperialism' to me.

The German market is very small, the English market very large. This means that if you translate from German to English, you invest a substantial amount of money to get a book onto an already crowded market dominated by English authors. That's a huge risk for the publisher. If you cannot market the book well enough on the foreign market, you will loose money. Literary translations are not cheap.

The other way around, if you translate a book from English to German, you can estimate very well from the performance on the gigantic English book market how it will sell in Germany. Bonus points if the author is already known in Germany anyway. The risk is lower than opening a program slot for a new German author (who would require additional marketing), and the cost of the translation is offset by the reduced risk.

At least that's my explanation. Maybe I'm wrong about it, I'm not a publisher.

>Seems more like basic economics than 'cultural imperialism' to me.

>The German market is very small, the English market very large.

Yes, and the English market is so very very large because... :)

To be fair, fans of science fiction are probably more likely to be fluent in English, so the domestic market has additional competition.

Because the UK, Australia, South Africa, Canada and the United States are ~6x the size of Germany. This was caused by colonialism, though, not cultural imperialism.

I would throw India in there too, as most everyone educated is fluent in English, and I expect more and more Indians to be fluent in English going forward.

Yeah, I think the person who made the cultural imperialism point was trying to say more or less that: that there are a lot of countries that speak English because English is the culturally dominant language. Personally I think there's a less sinister way to phrase that than "cultural imperialism," though. And I'm not sure it's caused by cultural dominance so much as economic dominance and pragmatism. I don't think many people learn English to watch American movies or wear American blue jeans.

Further, I'm not sure to what extent it affects the market size for books. I would guess, not being privy to any actual information on the topic, that the vast majority of English books are consumed by majority-English-speaking nations. There are probably exceptions for outsized blockbusters like Harry Potter.

Perhaps Nigeria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Belize too.

New Zealand, Ireland, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago add another 13.5 million.

On the flip side, English is only the first language of 9.6% of South Africans.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Africa#L...

There are way more native speakers in Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, etc.

Question then, would you say that the French had cultural imperialism when most geopolitical issues were conducted in French just a few hundred years ago? Or how about the Latin stranglehold on science and medicine? Why should english, german or polish speakers learn the Latin terms for dick all anything since it's practically a dead language. Who actually speaks Latin without being ironic? Or Italian was forced down every composer threats back in Mozart's day if they wanted to do an opera. Are those too forms of cultural imperialism?

My main point, dont pretend 'cultural imperialism' was invented by the Anglo saxons. Dont give them too much credit. Their egos are inflated as much as it is. All of history had a dominate 'culture'. I think the major difference to this shift to English is the fact the language is so damn easy and efficient compared to others. Maybe not as eloquent. But when it comes to information transfer, English is by far one of the best languages. Maybe that's why its inherently popular? I mean, in Polish, the word for the number 2 can be conjugated 50 some odd ways. Some intelligent anglo in history looked at other languages that conjugate like crazy and said it's fucking stupid. Obviously I'm being slightly hyperbolic. Only slightly.

Plus, the English culture is one where being upfront and abrupt is alright. Makes business real damn easy. It's a very "get to the goddamn point so I can go drink whiskey early" type of culture.

So yea, as a dirty slav, English is champ right now for very good technical reasons.

Sure, Latin was the language of empire, and then French had something of a small empire with the Holy Romans. Arabic was too for a while, depending on where you were. Now English is the language of empire.

French was spoken by the educated classes in much of the Western world for some time, had a largish colonial empire. Holy Roman Empire (neither Roman or Holy or an Empire) had German as a primary language.

Oh, you're right, of course. Brain fart.

> dont pretend 'cultural imperialism' was invented by the Anglo saxons

No one was saying this. As you correctly point out, other cultures and languages have been culturally dominant before, and now English is. It's entirely possible in another century or two it will be Mandarin, or Hindi, or who knows what.

> I think the major difference to this shift to English is the fact the language is so damn easy and efficient compared to others

That's a pretty rare take on English. Most people seem to think it's a PITA due to how many different languages it's cribbed from, resulting in next to zero consistent rules.

I have no idea where the myth started that people think English is a tough language for people. The only struggles non native speakers typically have is pronouncing th, usage of she/her, some oddball spellings, over use of same sounding words and if they come from non article languages, articles. That's a crazy short and easy to overcome list in comparison to, oh I dont know, all the goddamn irregular verbs of romance languages. Male/female articles or conjugation orgy fest most languages have. The tone and writing nature of most Asian languages.

Most people I know that do t speak english natively, picked it up pretty damn quick and easy.

Languages are chosen for many different reasons, which are not all obvious. Also it sounds like you're conflating language and culture, which are related things but not the same thing. If I know French, I can communicate with people in countries on three different continents, and the usefulness of a language trumps all other reasons for choosing a language. I've been in a few weird international groups, with people from dozens of countries present, and everyone communicates in French and English (a mix of both really), even though many of the people are multi-lingual, because everyone present knows at least a few snippets of French and English.

Because America, the country with mostly native English speakers, is 4x more populous than Germany.

And exactly why does America speak English, when a few centuries ago it was filled with native speakers of many other languages that are now very rare today?

Because the British Empire (and the Spanish and French empires) killed a great many of them, and forcibly imported their own cultures, people, and languages.

Which is unquestionably imperialism, and undoubtedly cultural. Hence: cultural imperialism.

If it weren't for cultural imperalism, the only native English speakers would be the population of the UK, which is about on par with Germany.

;-)

More recently, the US had a good number of German speakers too. Then WWI happened and people didn't want to be associated with Germany any more.

Pedantically the residents of England speak would be speaking Brittonic too minus cultural imperialism.

Making up artificial delineations on arbitrary segmentation of time gets a bit wearying.

Various cultures have their time in the sun and then retreat- it’s as old as humanity itself.

Because of some mistakes made in 1939-1942 timeframe?

Because it is professionally run and delivers to people what they want to read. In my view US cultural domination comes from actually caring about their customers and not some idealized abstraction of art.

> Seems more like basic economics than 'cultural imperialism' to me.

These are not at all mutually exclusive; economic policies (in particular exports and imports) figure heavily in academic literature on [cultural] imperialism.

Two things, first translations are a much bigger industry in German than in English, so you get a lot of French and Spanish translations. A book does not necessarily need to sell well in English, but it needs of course some reason that it gets picked up in the first place.

On Science Fiction, I almost exclusively read English novels, to the point were I would expect to miss German ones. The entire surrounding infrastructure, dedicated SF blogs, fanzines, reddit, is just not there in Germany, so I read the English ones and consequently read English language SF.

> The first German science fiction that comes to my mind ... "Die Haarteppichknüpfer" (great book from 1995): no idea if it sold well in English.

Oh, i read that! It's "The Carpet Makers" in English. I rather liked it; it's one of those stories which zooms out and out and out to reach dizzying perspectives of time and space and whatnot. Bit like Star Maker or some Stephen Baxter. It's definitely more modest than those, but it has a sort of creepiness to it that's unusual.

the existence of an english translation is useful to provide more local translations, but not a prerequisite, I believe.

For example, Valerio Evangelisti (italian horror/fantasy/sci-fi/weird writer) has more translated works in french/spanish/german than he has in english, to my knowledge.

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