from Hacker News

Roald Dahl books rewritten to remove language deemed offensive

by RansomStark on 2/18/23, 11:04 AM with 12 comments

• by tjpnz on 2/18/23, 1:21 PM

      Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.
  

  – George Orwell

• by andsoitis on 2/18/23, 11:17 AM

  “fat” replaced with “enormous”.

  are they really expecting enormous people to now be less offended?

• by nhchris on 2/18/23, 1:01 PM

  An argument I heard against "localization" [1] of video games and cartoons is that one would never dare "localize" [2] Moby Dick, the Odyssey, or the Gulag Archipelago, so why not extend the same courtesy to other media vying to be recognized as "art"?

  But apparently they would dare.

  The next question is, are they compelled to mark these books as altered from the original, or is there no recourse for this forgery, and they can lie with impunity about what Dahl has written, by putting his name above someone else's words?

  [1] Instead of mere translation, the dialogue, characters, and plot, are adjusted for a target market. Rice balls become hamburgers, jokes are re-written to not cause offense, references and phrases are changed to ones more familiar with the target market, etc.. Usually the practice is defended by offering a false dichotomy between a literal, word-for-word translation, vs. recreating the work as if it were made by and about members of the target market.

  "This person from Mumbai said X. But someone from San Francisco, in that same situation, would never have said X! They would say Y, so let's localize it to Y."

  [2] Not to be confused with adaptations, that do not try to pass themselves off as faithful renditions of the original, e.g. Romeo + Juliet

• by vmilner on 2/18/23, 1:34 PM

  If Dahl were alive I think we can assume he would either veto this if legally able to, or loudly tell the public to read the original editions. I’m surprised his estate haven’t objected to be honest.

  (EDIT: Apparently Netflix own the Roald Dahl copyrights now...)

• by piceas on 2/18/23, 2:12 PM

  Google too in a way.

  I dumped some children's poems from an old book into an app to make it easier to read to my kid when she was small. It failed an IARC rating recently (after a few years) presumably because "the cock is crowing and the cows are lowing" or the rain man comes to shower the meadows fresh and gay.

  One picks their fights in life and, sadly, I chose to let this one go. Updating the rating to 18+ will suffice for now.

• by SettembreNero on 2/18/23, 1:31 PM

  Mah. I see how words like "fat" or "female" can be unpleasant to read for someone, but I don't see how these kind of changes can be seen as offensive. Too much ado for nothing?

• by gedy on 2/18/23, 1:36 PM

  > Miss Trunchbull in Matilda, once a “most formidable female”, is now a “most formidable woman”.

  I don't get it, what does this "fix"?