Style of English in Index

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Cthaeh
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Style of English in Index

Post by Cthaeh »

Edit:
Now I feel like I wasted space by making a new thread...

Changes have been made. The new standard is American English except for the dialogue/monologue of British characters. I went through and converted all the BE outside of the exception to AE. Also, for the purposes of AE/BE I considered Tsuchimikado and Kanzaki as non-British.

Original post:
Spoiler! :
I would like to change the format of all narration and the speech of non-British characters to American English. Does anyone have any concerns or opinions on that?

I measured the distribution of American English (AE) and British English (BE) in all of the translated content by looking at the spellings of some common words. I found that 79% of it is currently in AE, and js06 translates in 100% AE. So I think changing to AE makes sense from that standpoint. Also, there are many places where the AE/BE is patchy and mixed within a single chapter. Changing to AE would be the best way to make that consistent, and to be consistent with future translations.

One of the original main points in selecting BE was that many of the characters were British, so it was a stylistic match. While I don't personally agree with that argument, there have been more American characters so it would be more appropriate to take a mixed approach now, for those who see it from that perspective.

While my personal preference would be to make everything AE, I think at least converting the narration from it's current patchwork mixture to AE would be an improvement for the series. I did check with Teh_ping via pm, and he gave permission for the changes to be discussed and considered, and would review it later.


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I am planning to do an edit for consistency across all volumes simultaneously (relying on find and replace); you can see my preliminary plans and list on my talk page. This pass of consistency editing would be a good opportunity to also update the style of English to be consistent as well. It's fairly easy for me to make it so that only narration is changed, and all dialogue/monologue would remain as it is currently. Making sure the dialogue and monologue match the character nationalities would require more involvement than I will be doing with my find/replace editing (actually I may try to do it a little bit, but it won't be perfect).

Also, this is jumping ahead of myself a little bit since the proposed changes haven't been properly discussed and approved yet, but what style of English do you think should be assigned to Kanzaki, Tsuchimikado, and Aleister? Kanzaki is Japanese, but was taught British English. I would say it should be AE when she's speaking Japanese, but BE when she's speaking English. Of course that would probably add too much complexity to an already complicated proposal, so it may be better just to pick one. Tsuchimikado is British. However, since he is a spy and should blend be blending in, I would say he should match the Japanese characters and use AE. Aleister is British, I guess?
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