[Corpora-List] American and British English spelling converter

Diana Maynard d.maynard at dcs.shef.ac.uk
Fri Nov 10 10:32:59 UTC 2006


Interesting indeed!
What strikes me as odd is the use of hyphens. In some cases, the British 
word has the hyphen and the US one does not (either has two words or one 
single word) and in other cases it's the reverse.
According to this "translation" anyway.
e.g.
British pitch black
US pitch-black

but
British bright-blue
UK bright blue

I can't see any kind of pattern in this, although I've only had a quick 
look! I've never seen "bright-blue" hyphenated in British English 
before, I must say!

Diana





Noah A Smith wrote:

> Apparently the Harry Potter children's books were published in a
> special edition for the US; see, e.g.,
> http://home.comcast.net/~helenajole/Harry.html, a website that
> presents a diff of the two versions.  (You don't get the rest of the
> text, of course.)  Example:
> 
>    They had drawn for the house cup
>    They had tied for the house cup
> 
> It may be important to you that the "translation" direction is B -> A.
> There may be other such books.  Apologies if this was already pointed
> out; I haven't followed the thread too carefully.
> 
> Best,
> Noah Smith
> Assistant Professor
> Language Technologies Institute
> School of Computer Science
> Carnegie Mellon University
> 
> 



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