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Some of those could be avoided by using a search regex such as "\bblonde\b". I believe a sophisticated enough regex could solve all of these, if it were a centr
by hunter2_ 3y ago
Some of those could be avoided by using a search regex such as "\bblonde\b". I believe a sophisticated enough regex could solve all of these, if it were a central library used and maintained by many.
- jwestbury 3y agoTroublingly, "blonde" isn't even a British vs. American English thing -- it's a gendered descriptor, of which we have relatively few remaining in English. Blonde is the feminine form, blond is the masculine/neuter form. Whether you want to preserve gendered adjectives is a different question entirely, but the definitions are rather clear, having carried over from French.
- ChrisRR 3y agoYou must be american if you think it's that easy. I think american don't realise how brits end up learning both our versions of words and theirs too because so much TV is american.
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoMaybe people can just deal with books having regional differences in the same way authors do. Is it so scary for F. Scott Fitzgerald to write about the color of the light, but Rowling to talk about the colours of the school houses?
- RheingoldRiver 3y agoAs someone who reads fantasy fiction a lot, honestly I'd prefer if I read everything in American English. The biggest thing that gets me is e.g. "defence" instead of "defense" and other places where British English uses a 'c' instead of an 's'. It seriously diminishes the immersion for me, even if I've read probably 50+ books with the version I'm not used to by now. It's never stopped me from reading a book before, but it does diminish my enjoyment quite a bit. For nonfiction, I don't care, I'm reading actively regardless. But when reading passively for enjoyment, it's noticeable and irritating.
- I_am_uncreative 3y ago...what? Why would this make a difference?
- OJFord 3y agoA differense, please, GP's reading.
- lmm 3y agoI've found this jarring only in one case: the dub of Mary and the Witch's Flower, where the setting was an emphatically English-style public school, the lead character's VA had (or was using) a strong Home Counties accent, but the lines were full of US-only terms like "Somophore". It just felt horribly fake (even in a fantasy story!) because you'd never see those things together in real life.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> but the lines were full of US-only terms like "Somophore" “Sophomore”, maybe?
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoSomophore is the same thing but they carry flags with them everywhere.
- lmm 3y agoOh probably, I don't really speak American and it was a while ago.
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoFor fantaſy, eſpecially, I diſagree. When I'm in charge, the long-ſ will be mandatory in any ſtory involving magick, to better ſhew the hiſtorical baſis of the mythology (unleſs, of courſe, a ſkinwalker were to be involved, in which caſe American ſpellings are indeed preferred)
- cvoss 3y agoThat example isn't scary, of course. The -or/-our spelling difference is only the simplest example of what's different between American and British English. I think it's pretty clear to someone who's never even encountered the other spelling to infer what the word means. But there are difficult examples, even in Rowling. She uses "revision" in a way that American readers don't know ("studying") and might have a hard time piecing together from context. It's not like the reader will be prompted to open a dictionary, since "revision" is a common word in AE. It just makes for a poor reader experience.
- girvo 3y agoThat's the most ridiculous thing I've come across in a while. It absolutely doesn't make for a poor reader experience, and that's some US Defaultism if I've ever heard it. And I'm neither British nor American! US writing is basically never localised to Australian English, why in the world must the converse be true?
- dylan604 3y agoIf this is what the level of education has become in the US, well, I guess it kind of explains a lot
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoDoesn't quite have the same ring to it: > Righto, mate, gimme a shout as Ishmael. Few donkey's years ago—don't get your knickers in a twist 'bout when exactly—findin' me wallet as dry as a dead dingo's donger, and not a bloody thing worth a squiz on the land, reckon I'd chuck a U-ey on life, put a bit of water under me bridge. Wanted a stickybeak at the wet half of this great wide world, didn't I? (With ChatGPT assist!)
- ChrisRR 3y agoDonkeys years ago means a long time. You don't prefix it with a few.
- friendzis 3y ago
- mr_toad 3y agoI think the sort of people who read books can probably cope. It sounds like the publishers are making allowances for the sort of people who don’t do much reading anyway.
- slowmovintarget 3y agoUhh... People who count listening to the audio book as "reading."
- pjmlp 3y agoAt least it is the full book, unlike movie adaptations, also a nice way to "read" while driving.
- seanhunter 3y agoWell people listening to the audio book: - can’t hear the differences in spelling between American and British English - are listening to someone read. That person probably is able to read either American or British English. That said, some words really are different and could cause confusion/disconnect so probably are potential candidates for being changed even in audio books. - the one he gave “apartment” vs “flat” is a good example. I think British people would all be fine with “apartment” whereas I think “flat” might confuse some Americans who hadn’t heard that usage. - “pavement” means the road surface in the US vs it means the pedestrian path on the side of the road in the UK (that in the US you would call a “sidewalk”). “Sidewalk” wouldn’t confuse a British person but it’s not a word a British person would use. “Pavement” meaning the road surface does confuse British people. - “jumper” in the UK vs “sweater” in the US - Don’t even ask about “pants” - etc
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoMy favourite anecdote is when an english bloke goes to the U.S. and asks if he can "bum a fag" from someone, meaning "ask for a free cigarette" in British.
- b800h 3y ago
- slowmovintarget 3y agoThis. Stop dumbing things down (like my browser's dictionary that apparently doesn't know the word "dumbing"). Let the readers find and delight in the differences of diction and usage.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- chociej 3y agoIt's a shame that part-of-speech analysis tools aren't more widely available or widely used. That could at least reduce the damage done on "flat" -> "apartment", even when only considering entire words.
- viraptor 3y agoThis is not going to save you completely unfortunately. You still need to know if a flat is a flat tyre, a flatbed, or an apartment.
- RheingoldRiver 3y agoSurely, an LLM could handle this, if it were to get fed the entire book in chunks. "Change all mentions of the word 'flat' in its connotation as the British word for 'apartment', to say 'apartment'. Make no other changes to the manuscript." Then have it double-check its work afterwards. "Does every instance of the word 'apartment' in this text make sense? Does every instance of the word 'flat' in this text make sense in American English?" and then run this prompt on each pair of words that you want it to do. When it's done, run a quick diffcheck on it & check its work to learn of any gotchas.
- LordShredda 3y agoWhy the hell does it have to be AI? A regex would be faster to run, test, and diff check. Even better,instead of paying a programmer to waste your time just pay an actual editor to proof read it
- TeMPOraL 3y agoIt doesn't. It perhaps shouldn't. That said, I found myself doing little text mangling tasks with GPT-4 instead of appropriate command line tools, because fuck if I remember the flags to sort and unique, and it's much faster to just describe what I want and have the LLM take a crack at it. This is why, I think, you'll see a lot of simple(ish) tasks being done by LLMs, at couple orders of magnitude more compute cost - it's just that much more convenient. EDIT: nevermind. That was about just doing regex replace. But if you want to do it correctly in an automated way, LLMs are indeed the best tool for the job in the general case, because they understand how language work, in a way that you can't really formalize in code. No, feeding the complete definition of English grammar to the computer won't help, because a) it probably doesn't exist, and b) even if it does, it's merely a suggestion - natural language is a living thing, and is not bound by fixed rulesets.
- lalopalota 3y agoTyping out the instructions, copying and pasting the data, then analyzing the output for correctness is faster than running `sort -h` ?
- TeMPOraL 3y agoPeople knowing enough about regex replace to use word boundaries are most likely aware just how dangerous bulk replacing is, and will either be super careful, or just won't do it like that.