sister_luck (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sister_luck) wrote2013-01-27 07:11 pm
sister_luck) wrote2013-01-27 07:11 pm
Entry tags:
Books and outdated language.
When it comes to - for want of a better word - social justice issues it seems like Germany always lags a couple of years behind the US and the UK. In the past couple of years I've seen German bloggers complain about children's books with language that is now considered derogatory but was widely accepted when the books were first published, like Neger, i.e. negro, but the discussion has only now become mainstream with a publisher going through several beloved classics and - with the approval of the writer's descendants - changing some of those words to more acceptable terms.
You can guess the reaction - there are the people who cry "censorship" and "PC gone mad" and then there are the people who actually try to explain how language change works and no, we can't expect the parents to change the words while reading to their kids (I've done that, for example with Jim Knopf who makes his first appearance as a Negerbaby) or expect them to go into a lecture about how we don't say Negerkönig anymore and yes, Pippi Longstocking's father manages to be one in the Südsee which is a serious geography fail, because that's the Southern Pacific, but please don't call the black kid sitting next to you in class Neger.
It's complicated in some ways like with Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn and the use of the n-word which was changed in several modern German translations, instead opting for Neger or Neger-Sklaven, I just checked on amazon.
And fairly easy in others, where it's only a question of changing one word for that one instant when a black person is mentioned.
Anyway, my cold has meant that I finally had the time to read The woman who died a lot by Jasper Fforde and somehow that manages to sum up the whole thing very nicely, with an Enid Blyton enthusiast who wants to go back to an England that never was and use the original version of the books as a template and the idea of some books getting Class II Protected Book status.
You can guess the reaction - there are the people who cry "censorship" and "PC gone mad" and then there are the people who actually try to explain how language change works and no, we can't expect the parents to change the words while reading to their kids (I've done that, for example with Jim Knopf who makes his first appearance as a Negerbaby) or expect them to go into a lecture about how we don't say Negerkönig anymore and yes, Pippi Longstocking's father manages to be one in the Südsee which is a serious geography fail, because that's the Southern Pacific, but please don't call the black kid sitting next to you in class Neger.
It's complicated in some ways like with Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn and the use of the n-word which was changed in several modern German translations, instead opting for Neger or Neger-Sklaven, I just checked on amazon.
And fairly easy in others, where it's only a question of changing one word for that one instant when a black person is mentioned.
Anyway, my cold has meant that I finally had the time to read The woman who died a lot by Jasper Fforde and somehow that manages to sum up the whole thing very nicely, with an Enid Blyton enthusiast who wants to go back to an England that never was and use the original version of the books as a template and the idea of some books getting Class II Protected Book status.