A lot of people in the notes are defending this with stuff like “why are you so mad that this guy made the book easier to read for himself, would you rather just not read it than read it using an accesibility feature?” And I gotta say I’m of two minds about this.
On the one hand, it’s not wrong for people to do whatever they want or need to make reading easier for them, and it seems like this change legitimately helped him get through the book more easily. At the same time, I also don’t think it’s wrong to notice or point out how this particular accesibility feature fits neatly into broader societal trends of a lot of westerners (and particularly anglos) being conditioned by their own global cultural hegemony to be unwilling to make the bare minimum effort to mentally engage with anything that isn’t immediately palatable to them, and of art being seen as unpalatable and inaccessible to western audiences if it isn’t stripped of “foreign” elements that might make it unrelatable to them.
Like. This IS a decent short-term fix, but also I think that if someone’s at the point where they find it hard to read a book because they keep mixing up names that don’t look or sound anything like each other because they all sound foreign I think it’s worth questioning if you’re having that problem because foreign names are inherently difficult and inaccessible for you, or because you’ve been culturally conditioned for your brain to bounce off anytime it encounters anything that’s too foreign-looking.
This might well work to make the book more accessible for this guy, but I don’t think it’s anything wrong with questioning why this accesibility feature is like. Two steps removed from 4Kids changing “onigiri” to “jelly donuts” in the Pokemon dub.
I honestly think an accessibility feature is maybe a skewed way to view it? Or I guess more accurately, accessibility features are not automatically value neutral. You need to ask, what is this accommodating?
Very much like imsobadatnicknames2 said, yeah it makes the book easier to read for this person, but why? Like as someone who’s a native english speaker, things are frankly remarkably easy and sanitized for us. It is very comfortable to never have to learn how foreign names are pronounced (and indeed to never have to deconstruct what we consider a “foreign” name is in the first place); our media is filled to the brim with typical white people names, and when we do get names of other ethnicities or cultures, they are typically those that are easiest for an anglophone westerner to pronounce. “Nguyen” is one of the most common family names in the world, yet I have never once seen it in any film or tv show and I have found it in exactly one book. Maybe my media tastes are pretty bland and undiversified, but that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? Because I’d have to hear and learn how to pronounce a name I don’t know already, it’s very easy for one of the most common surnames to just never come up.
So again, what is this person accommodating? They make no mention of dyslexia, or trouble reading, and a pronounciation guide seems easy enough to google. Are they accommodating poor memory? Because a small sheet of notes would do the exact same, AND reinforce the learning of these new (to them) names.
Because that’s the crux of it, right? They aren’t making it easier to learn, or easier to invest in cultural differences. They are making it easier to ignore them.
At the end of the day, it’s their copy of the book, so it’s theirs to modify as they please, I guess. But is that really how you want to engage with the text? By covering up pieces of it? What growth and discovery are you giving up to be comfortable? Who are you erasing to remain unchallenged?
[ID: A tweet from @ BatkaA02 that reads, “Scientific experiment: we gave a redditor a book to read that isn’t Harry Potter.” Attached is a screenshot of a Reddit post from watzor2332. It reads, “The content isn’t difficult however what I personally really struggled with was the names. You have Rodion Raskolnikov, Avdotya Raskolnikov, Marmeladov, Svidrigailov, Razumikhin, Katerina Ivanovna etc etc. I had a hard time remembering who was who. My solution was, because I was reading on Kindle, to save the .mobi file to my computer, open it with a free editor I downloaded and do some bulk replaces. I replaced them with common English names, Pete, Roger, Kate etc.” / END ID]
