American English Abroad

If this has been exhaustively discussed before in the group, please point me to the relevant spot in the archives. I couldn't think of an efficient search strategy, so I apologize in advance if this is old hat.
It is commonly ***erted that American English (spelling, vocabulary, idioms) is standard only in North America (and acceptable only to a limited degree in Canada, at that). The international standard remains British English.
I doubt this. Despite the fact that England's former colonies commonly follow UK usage, there is a lot of the rest of the world (the Middle East, China, Japan) from which many people go abroad to study in American schools and follow American patterns, presumably taking them home again. Pop-song lyrics are clearly Americanized. American movies must have a lot of influence as well.
Hong Kong aside, do Chinese writers of English tend to follow US or UK standards? In official documents? How about NATO documents written in English? UN documents? Governmental and educational publications in European or Latin American countries where English is not the first language? When a French novel is translated in France into English, which dialect is used?
How about English versions of Web sites which translate non-English originals? Is there a difference between former Commonwealth nations in Africa and others which never had English as an official language?
Has there been any formal study of this anyone could tell me about?

"Percival P. Cassidy" nob...@notmyISP.net

English-language schools in Taiwan often used to advertise for teachers but specified "American or Canadian only." Perce

"Mike Lyle" mike_lyle...@yahoo.co.uk

We've touched on the matter from time to time, but I don't think you'd get more than fragments from an archive search. It does seem a very doubtful ***ertion. But, give or take a few spellings and a few scraps of vocabulary, I'm not sure there are enough obvious differences between the traditions for a reader to be sure of the provenance of a piece of formal writing: which I suppose means I must be getting perilously close to a claim that for practical purposes there are no separate American and other formal Englishes. Informal usage is another matter, of course.
--
Mike.

"Mike Lyle" mike_lyle...@yahoo.co.uk

"tinwhistler" ozziemal...@post.harvard.edu

That's a good question for which I wish I knew the answer. It's also quite timely, because there is a fad right now for just this sort of translation, in France, into English. I do know from some prior expert advice that when a French publisher uses the word "American," it is referring to USers, not Canadians, etc.

"UC" uraniumcommit...@yahoo.com

It is really more likely to be 'International English" in which sometimes British, but oftener American English practices dominate.

Peter Moylan pe...@ozebelgDieSpammers.org

My wife has a number of novels where the front matter includes the statement "traduit de l'am?©rican". Unfortunately, I can't offer any evidence in the opposite direction.
I would imagine that it depends on who is doing the translation. Right now I'm reading [1] an English translation of "Les Mis?©rables", and I'm fairly certain that it's in British English, but it stays so close to the original French that it's tempting to say that it's in French English.
[1] Very slowly. Why do reprints of well-known literature use such small print, when we all know that young people don't read them?
--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org Please note the changed e-mail and web addresses. The domain eepjm.newcastle.edu.au no longer exists, and I can no longer receive mail at my newcastle.edu.au addresses. The optusnet address could disappear at any time.

dontbother dontbot...@mushmail.mom

And except for The Cambridge School and other exclusively British institutions, that's still the case. I was checking the want ads in The China Post yesterday while eating my lunch. They generally specified "North American accent only".
--
Franke: EFL teacher & medical editor Native speaker of American English; posting from Taiwan.
Unmunged email: /at/easypeasy.com "Impatience is the mother of misery."

Ted Schuerzinger fe...@bestweb.spam

Is it still standard for British English to use the 'single quote mark' instead of the "double quotation mark"?
I'd think there are enough differences in orthography to be able to discern whether a piece of formal writing was USE or BrE most of the time (***uming those were the only two choices, of course). But I'd also think the original question is more germane when it comes to teaching pronunciation: should you pronounce R's where they are written on the page, or should you move them around?
--
Ted <fedya at bestweb dot net> TV Announcer: It's 11:00. Do you know where your children are?
Homer: I told you last night, *no*!
<http://www.snpp.com/episodes/4F06.html>

woll ...@csail.mit.edu (Garrett Wollman)

What makes you so sure of that? I thought the principal market for those books was undergraduates in college bookstores.
-GAWollman
--
Garrett A. Wollman | As the Constitution endures, persons in every woll...@csail.mit.edu | generation can invoke its principles in their own Opinions not those | search for greater freedom.
of MIT or CSAIL. | - A. Kennedy, Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003)

Steve Hayes hayesm...@hotmail.com

Still?
When was it ever?
--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa http://people.tribe.net/hayesstw E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

"athel...@yahoo" athel...@yahoo.co.uk

Is this really "commonly ***erted"? By whom? Where? As you are writing from a US address, I suppose you are saying that this is ***erted in the US, but if so I am surprised.
I think all this is true.
You might find it interesting to visit http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/. It's an excellent and interesting blog from many points of view, but you may be particularly interested in an entry from 2nd September 2006 entitled "What's the name of your University?", from which you will see that Chinese specialists in English are not above inventing their own "rules of English" that are unknown to native speakers.
I can't answer your specific question. The most common thing is for French novels to be translated into English in an English-speaking country, and when that happens the translator most often uses the rules of the country where it will be published. When French publishers publish translations from English to French (not your question, I know) they commonly distinguish between "traduit de l'am?©ricain" for something from the US and "traduit de l'anglais" for something from the UK (not making any distinction between different parts of the UK, so I don't think a translation from Sir Walter Scott would be labelled "traduit de l'?©cossais"). However, this is _not_ part of everyday French usage: the language is just called "anglais", regardless of variety.
Closer to your question is what happens when French publishers publish work written in English by French speakers (as they increasingly do: a generation ago the journal Biochimie was written entirely in French; now it is entirely in English). Most French people of my acquaintance have only a vague notion (if any) of the difference between AmE and BrE, and freely mix spellings like sulfur, colour, haemoglobin and heme in the same text. I've never detected much sign that French publishers who produce stuff in English are any more conscious of this than authors are. When I check the work of French colleagues I don't now bother with inconsistencies of this kind unless I know the article has already been criticized on the grounds of poor English. Any competent publisher pays sub-editors (= AmE redactories) to produce as much consistency as they think they need.
athel

"athel...@yahoo" athel...@yahoo.co.uk

I've often wondered who invented this myth, and myth it surely is. It looks like the sort of thing that micro$oft might have invented (along with their notion that only spellings in -ise rather than -ize are acceptable in BrE), except that I have the impression that it is older than that.
The Chicago Manual of Style (section 11.33) has it more or less right: "The practice in other English-speaking countries is often the reverse: single marks are used first, then double, and so on". However, I think "often" is too strong, and would prefer "sometimes", or better still "The practice of certain publishers in other English-speaking countries is the reverse...".
athel

Peter Moylan pe...@ozebelgDieSpammers.org

You might be right. Perhaps I should just surrender and get my gl***es replaced. I've been putting that off for several years, but my arms are shrinking again.
--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org Please note the changed e-mail and web addresses. The domain eepjm.newcastle.edu.au no longer exists, and I can no longer receive mail at my newcastle.edu.au addresses. The optusnet address could disappear at any time.

Peter Duncanson m...@peterduncanson.net

On 5 Oct 2006 01:53:48 -0700, "athel...@yahoo" Yes. It is a matter of house style. My personal preference is to use double marks first.
--
Peter Duncanson, UK (in alt.usage.english)

HVS harvey.n...@ntlworld.com

-snip-
Excellent question; hadn't thought of this.
A (very) quick search of the NATO site turns up "dialogue" and "labour" in transcriptions of speeches; a similar quick visit to the UN site finds "programme" and "dialogue" on the front page of the "News" section. Presumably both of these represent some sort of organisational style guide.
--
Cheers, Harvey Canadian and British English, indiscriminately mixed For e-mail, change harvey.news to harvey.van

Ted Schuerzinger fe...@bestweb.spam

I'm American, and have never heard the term "redactory".
--
Ted <fedya at bestweb dot net> TV Announcer: It's 11:00. Do you know where your children are?
Homer: I told you last night, *no*!
<http://www.snpp.com/episodes/4F06.html>

Ted Schuerzinger fe...@bestweb.spam

All of the old published-in-Britain books I've got from when I studied Russian Lit back in college used the single quotes where we in the US would always use double quotes. An example I've got on my shelf is the Penguin Cl***ics translation of Gogol's "Dead Souls", first published in 1961.
--
Ted <fedya at bestweb dot net> TV Announcer: It's 11:00. Do you know where your children are?
Homer: I told you last night, *no*!
<http://www.snpp.com/episodes/4F06.html>

"athel...@yahoo" athel...@yahoo.co.uk

Well, it's not something I'd want to fight about, but I'm sure I heard the word at a meeting of editors that I attended in 1985: all the American editors talked about redactories and none of the UK editors understood the term until it was explained to mean the same as sub-editors. However, there is no reason why an ordinary AmE speaker who hadn't had much dealings with publishing technicalities would come across the word, any more than I expect the BrE speaker on the Clapham omnibus to know what a sub-editor was.
However, just to show that I didn't invent the word, here is a sentence from the Resopurces to Authors of the journal Molecular and Cellular Proteomics: "Use the Rapid Inspector software to check your figure files (TIFF or EPS) against JBC standards for format, resolution, color space and other figure requirements before you submit them to the Redactory office". To save anyone the trouble of pointing it out, I realize that it is not clear from the context if it has the meaning here that I attributed to it: I certainly wouldn't say "Sub-editor Office" in a BrE context, though I probably would say "Editorial Office" -- and in my experience most Editorial Offices don't usually house any editors, but are instead filled up with sub-editors.
a.

woll ...@csail.mit.edu (Garrett Wollman)

Sounds like the sort of term an academic publisher would use. In general-readership publishing, to the best of my knowledge, the term is "copyeditor" or in some cases "line editor". In the particular case of newspaper publishing, the copyeditor is also the person who writes the headline.
-GAWollman
--
Garrett A. Wollman | As the Constitution endures, persons in every woll...@csail.mit.edu | generation can invoke its principles in their own Opinions not those | search for greater freedom.
of MIT or CSAIL. | - A. Kennedy, Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003)

t ...@euronet.nl (Donna Richoux)

When does Microsoft propagate myths about British use? Oh, you mean through its grammar checkers? If you choose British English, does it automatically put single marks outside of quotations?
--
Best -- Donna Richoux An American living in the Netherlands.

Peter Duncanson m...@peterduncanson.net

I posted as me. I wasn't impersonating Harvey.
--
Peter Duncanson, UK (in alt.usage.english)

t ...@euronet.nl (Donna Richoux)

I just happened to be at the site of the Houston Chronicle and while I was there, I looked through the headlines; they hardly use any quotation marks at all, but I found one set, and they were singles.
--
Best -- Donna Richoux

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