How to Write Books For the North American English Speaking Audience

Making a book available to the English reading audience in North America, whether it's Canada or the United States, requires more than simply having it translated into English from a foreign language. The quality of the translation is important but so is keeping in mind what the reader may expect or find confusing and which words may need to be translated while others may be accepted already as foreign words well known to English readers such as "deja vous," "burrito," or "sushi."

Even if you are not translating a book, but simply writing a book set in a foreign country that is largely unfamiliar to readers, you need to assume your reader is predominantly not knowledgeable about your topic and then make the topic and setting accessible for him or her. In other words, you must allow the book to retain its foreign charm or atmosphere while making it less "foreign," which may mean explaining customs, religion, or inside politics to readers so they can follow the book, or not dwelling on these items unless they are relevant to understanding the plot and characters. Remember while a non-fiction book has much more leeway because readers want information and detail, a novel is intended foremost as entertainment so you have to make the book accessible in a way that will entertain yet retain the key foreign elements of the text.

Here are a few simple tips to get you started in making your book accessible to the English-speaking North American audience:

Translation Rules:

    Do not let anyone whose first language is not English translate your book. Even if you hire a professor of English, and you live in France and the professor's first language is French, chances are no matter how wonderful that person's English is, he will not write English as well as a native speaker. (If you find you have no other option, then follow the advice in the next point).
    If you do hire a person whose first language is not English to translate your book into English, then hire an English speaker to edit the book. For example, if you are Slovenian and cannot find a native speaker of English who can translate Slovenian, you might find a Slovenian who can speak English to translate your book into English, but then you will want someone whose first language is English to edit the book to make sure the book reads smoothly and is grammatically correct.
    Hire a speaker of American English to translate and/or edit if you plan to sell the book in the United States. Many books translated into English have been translated into British rather than American English. While both are technically English, there are some significant differences in word meanings and spellings and American readers might find the British usage confusing. That said, Canadian readers probably will have no problem with the British English spelling (nor will Australian readers).

Spelling Differences:

British and American English have standard spellings that are slightly different. Here are just three of the most common:

    U: Words such as "honour" and "colour" are spelled with "u" in British English while Americans drop the "u" and spell them as "honor" and "color."
    S & Z: The British tend to use "s" in words where Americans would use "z" as in a word like "realise/realize."
    RE or ER: The British will spell words with an "re" ending such as "theatre" and "centre" while in American English they would be "theater" and "center."

Word Connotation Differences:

Some words in American English have different meanings than in British English. For example:

    Bonnet: In British English, a "bonnet" is the "hood" of a car. American English only uses "hood" for this part of a car, while in American English a "bonnet" is a type of hat.
    Lorry: "Lorry" is the British word for "truck." American English does not use this word at all.
    Fag: In British English, "fag" means a cigarette. In American English, it's a derogatory term for a homosexual and short for "faggot," which is commonly misspelled as "fagot." In both forms of English, "fagot" means a piece of wood.

Watch Out for Confusing Names

An American reader will soon find his head swimming even if you are using common American names that have similar spellings. For example, the American reader might have a hard time keeping Mark, Matt, Mike, and Mitch separate in his head, or for that matter, Peggy, Polly, Pam, and Patty could cause equal confusion. So if you are writing for an American audience and using foreign names, you especially need to be careful. If your novel is Arabic and your characters are Mohammed, Mustafa, and Mufid, you might easily confuse your reader as to who is who. Even more confusing would be hyphenated names that have the same beginning such as Abdul-Aziz, Abdul-Bari, and Abdul-Fattah. In this case, you might choose to drop the "Abdul" from the names and settle for Aziz, Bari, and Fattah, which are all fairly different in appearance.

Don't be Tolstoy. Anyone who has ever tried to read one of Tolstoy's novels such as "Anna Karenina" or "War and Peace" can find himself easily confused. Not only do Tolstoy's Russian characters have first and last names, but they also have middle names and nicknames, and Tolstoy has certain characters use different names depending on who is speaking to the character. Alexis' mother might call him Alexis while his friend calls him Nicholas, his middle name, and his professors call him Ilyanovich for his last name. The poor reader not only has to keep track of fifty characters, but three or so names per character to make up 150 names. One of the best solutions to this problem was a translation of "Anna Karenina" (see below) that settled on just one name for each character, changing all the individual characters' many names to one name per character for the reader to remember.

Focus on Broad Brush Strokes over Details

If you are writing fiction about another culture, you want to provide the feeling of that culture to the reader without giving an exhaustive history, geography, or cultural lesson. While the reader of non-fiction will probably be more tolerant of details, readers of novels want to be entertained, not expected to work to learn something.

The novelist should never assume the reader knows anything about what is, to him or her, a foreign culture being presented in the book. Nor should the novelist expect that the reader is going to run to the dictionary, encyclopedia, or Internet to look up unfamiliar terms. Readers who find they have to consult other sources, even if they are footnotes provided in the book, are quickly going to find that reading the book is too much work, and they are going to go elsewhere for information.

A novel set in a foreign country should provide just enough cultural glamour to wet the reader's interest-perhaps to make the reader understand the magic or the significance of the other culture. If the novelist has done a good job, he will first and foremost have told a story that is entertaining. If that is all he does, he will have succeeded. If the reader is intrigued enough to want to learn more about the culture or country beyond that, he can then do further reading in history books or encyclopedias or even visit the country that is the setting for the novel.

Finally, remember that several novels set in foreign countries have been successful among American reading audiences. Equally, several novels translated into English have been successful. To prepare your book for the American reading audience, you may do well to read some of these books and see how the culture is presented while being accessible to the reader and then follow that author or translator's example.

Old Encyclopedia Year Books - What Can You Learn In Hindsight?

Not long ago, I was at a local thrift store which also happens to have a good selection of used books. I frequently go into see what's there and the inventory turns over every couple weeks or so. On the free shelves they had half a set of encyclopedias. Now then, no one really wants a set of encyclopedias these days, no one except for me that likes to do research to help with my writing, and I suppose even fewer folks would want half a set of encyclopedias.

Nevertheless, I rescued these books from the free pile. In scanning through all this information and yes I have read the Encyclopedia before, I noticed some interesting things in the yearbooks, those add-on books which come with an encyclopedia subscription, or at least they used to when people were still buying these books. In each year book they had all the major events; natural disasters, scientific discoveries, major developments in all industries, and the big events in governments around the world.

What I found quite fascinating is many of the things that we think are new inventions today, were actually invented decades ago. We might think that something is a new development, or a breakthrough area of science, but the predecessor discoveries which are only backdated a couple of incremental notches of the chain came old about long ago. What it also tells us is that whenever a new discovery is a made, people think of all the potential applications and how this will change everything right away. Things never happen that fast.

In fact, it takes years for this stuff to come to fruition, and for it to become reliable enough for some entrepreneur to pick up this new technology and run with it. Sometimes the defense department, or the entertainment industry, or perhaps the healthcare sector will advance the technology as fast as they can, but even so it could be five years until it has proven itself reliable, and even longer until that percolates into the consumer markets.

Although it appears that we are making incredible leaps in technology every single day, and as we read the press releases from various universities and research divisions, it's as if everything is changing so fast, but the reality is that humans resist change, and so do industries. After all, why should they change something that is currently working for something that is not guaranteed to work in the future, even though it will bring significant advances someday - if they are making money now, why risk something new?

This overall lesson of the speed of technology to market and into our everyday lives is something you can learn by merely paging through the old Encyclopedia yearbooks. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.