In London in the summer of 1982, as I waited for my university studies to begin, I worked at various jobs—including, out of curiosity, a spell selling encyclopaedia sets door-to-door (at that time, of course, encyclopaedias were still only in print form).
In this case, the encyclopaedia in question was not the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but some American publication that I had never heard of, and whose name I can no longer remember.
At the first briefing of the team, the boss—a tall, blond, well-dressed man with a slick salesman manner who, in hindsight, reminds me of Donald Trump—told us that if we were to encounter doubts about the encyclopaedia being American, we should point out that there were only 42 differences between American English and British English (or some such number—I may be confusing it with Douglas Adams’ answer to “Life, the Universe, and Everything”)—so that shouldn’t be an issue .
As someone who had done most of his elementary schooling in New York, this claim seemed a little dubious to me, and indeed I soon discovered that that was not the only lie that he told us, and within two weeks I had left the job for the scam that it was.
In the years that followed, I came to realise how untrue his claim was. Today, when I am asked to translate a work into English, my first question is, “Which one? American or British?”
Most people—on either side of the pond—tend to think that the differences boil down to different spellings of a few words, such as colour/color, centre/center. But as someone who has lived for years in both the US and the UK (and now, Canada) I can tell you that in reality, there are many marked differences that make a retroactive change from one to the other too laborious. These include different spellings; different meanings of the same word; different words for the same concept; language use and richness of vocabulary; and even punctuation.
I’m not even talking about slang, or the fact that one must always adapt the language to the speaker: the English of a precocious 13-year-old son of professors at Princeton University is very different from that of a truck driver in the same state (New Jersey)—not to mention that of a young bachelorette in London (all of which I have been asked to emulate in stories translated into English).
Although these differences might seem to be relevant only when translating fiction, they also apply in academic writing or non-fiction, especially when it involves rendering the speech of real-world individuals into that of their American or British counterparts to give a sense of their social background and education. But even in academic writing, or journalism, there are differences.
Here, then, is a brief summary:
Spelling
Many words are spelled differently. Here are just some of the best-known examples (for a more comprehensive list, see UK vs US spelling list):
Meaning
Many words—such as braces, chips, dummy, fanny, first floor, football, gas, mad, pants, pavement, pissed, rubber, subway, trainer, trolley, and vest—have completely different meaning in the two countries (for a full list, see the list in Wikipedia).
Different terms for the same concept
For example:
Media folk and public figures in the US tend to use big Latinate words to impress, while their British counterparts will usually opt for simpler, more Anglo-Saxon terms. Thus, a weatherperson in the US might say probability of precipitation, while their counterpart in the UK would say chance of rainfall.