[Paul Rubin] ... >> David J.C. MacKay >> Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms >> >> Full text online: >> http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/ ... >> The printed version is somewhat expensive, but according to the >> following analysis it's a better bargain than "Harry Potter and the >> Philosopher's Stone": >> >> http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/Potter.html
[Grant Edwards] > That made me smile on a Monday morning (not an insignificant > accomplishment). I noticed in the one footnote that the H.P. > book had been "translated into American". I've always wondered > about that. I noticed several spots in the H.P. books where > the dialog seemed "wrong": the kids were using American rather > than British English. I thought it rather jarring. You should enjoy: http://www.hp-lexicon.org/about/books/differences.html and especially the links near the bottom to try-to-be-exhaustive listings of all differences between the Bloomsbury (UK) and Scholastic (US) editions. More "Britishisms" are surviving in the Scholastic editions as the series goes on, but as the list for Half-Blood Prince shows the editors still make an amazing number of seemingly pointless changes: http://www.hp-lexicon.org/about/books/hbp/differences-hbp.html like: UK: Harry smiled vaguely back US: Harry smiled back vaguely Non-English translations have real challenges, and because this series is more popular than the Python Reference Manual these days, there's a lot of fascinating info to be found. For example, I think the Japanese translator deserves a Major Award for their heroic attempt to translate Ron's "Uranus" pun: http://www.cjvlang.com/Hpotter/wordplay/uranus.html -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
