English to English: 'translating' a cultural divide

Our Tumblr project has explored over 400 US-UK cross-cultural topics. As the Guardian continues to reach a global audience, the nature of ‘translations’ is changing

Our reader-submitted English to English Valentine's explored love and romance from a cross-cultural perspective. Photograph: Guardian

Since its launch last May, the Guardian’s English to English Tumblr project has explored hundreds of topics that cause great confusion (or, at the very least, a bit of head-scratching) to people reading from different locations around the globe.

The project was launched by journalists in our US office after we found ourselves constantly defending ‘Americanisms’ in story threads. We’d come to learn that an ‘Americanism’ was a vague descriptor that, yes, included how we phrased and spelled things, but also would come to gauge how we devoted coverage to celebrities, holidays, music and foods. This particular open thread about Thanksgiving, for example, will go down in infamy as the Americanism heard round the world, butexchanges like these were far more common:

COMPLETE ARTICLE IN http://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2014/mar/12/english-to-english-translating-cultural-divide?CMP=fb_us