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Remember when the first Harry Potter was released in the U.S.?

The language was "cleaned up" for American audiences - words such as "shan't" were changed to "won't" - even the title was changed from Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

I could not find an original copy in the United States! My kids were young at the time and I read to them from this book - and I would have appreciated having the English version over the American version specifically because of the difference in language. One of my neighbors had one sent to her from London.

See a list of changes for the American audience here:

https://www15.uta.fi/FAST/US1/REF/potter.html

My Canadian wife and I regularly have "dictionary wars". While the OED generally favors her diction, and the Websters Unabridged 2nd Edition mine, there are notable exceptions.

The English versus American edition pops up all over the place. My wife had read about a child-rearing book called French Children Don't Throw Food, and I could only find the book on the UK Amazon site. In fact, the American version was named Bringing Up Bébé. This was done perhaps out of fear of getting sued by the publisher of French Women Don't Get Fat. I only found out after I purchased the English edition for her.

Besides the title, other small changes were certainly made. Harry Potter would have been better off keeping the British flavor. It certainly hasn't hurt Shakespeare, Jane Austin, The Prisoner or Monty Python.

When my old employer decided to come out with a new edition of English author Canon Ripley's This Is the Faith, we did make small revisions as some of the author's analogies would not be understood by an American without some changes. Even in those cases, we appended an equivalent American term, while keeping the original English term. Two that come to mind had to do with getting service at a Harrods. We simply changed it to "Harrods or Macy's". We also changed "Meccano set" to "Meccano or Erector set", as Meccano was practically unknown stateside.