APA style for British/Canadian Spelling vs American

[JockNerd]

Weird question. If I'm citing something from a Brit or Canadian journal, and it uses standard English rather than American (e.g., Canadian Journal of Behavioural Sciences), what do folks see as the standard for doing that? It seems wrong to me to change the words in the reference, especially the name of the journal, but it's not like a full translation would be necessary. Couldn't find anything in the 6th edition on it.

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[Neuropsych2be]

Jocknerd

Anything produced by the APA is blinkered and shortsighted so I am not surprised that the 6th manual does not address this. Remember the APA 6th is the windows Vista of style manuals. When I was a postgrad student in Britain studying in a related area, I was faced with a similar problem: how to cite American journals for work submitted in the British system. Those tweed covered folk with the funny accents get very possessive about their language. You'd think they invented English. Anyway I cited American journals with American spelling conventions. I have always cited British, Australian, and other Commonwealth journals using the actual name of the journal as it is published in its native country. So I would recommend that you follow that process. I feel that this is the most respectful and accurate way to do things. It is also the most pragmatic approach. If an American does an online search for a British journal using "Behavioral" rather than "Behavioural" they will have trouble finding the reference. The whole purpose of references is to allow the reader to find the article you cite easily. If you muck around with the name of the journal or the paper in the citation, you complicate the process.

On the other hand, if you really want to irritate a British person while sipping on a lager (American beer) in a publick house (pub), you can pontificate on the merits of American spelling and explain why we have vastly improved upon the English language. Of course we have also improved upon so much that has crossed the Atlantic such as baseball (from the British game rounders) and our political system with a written constitution etc... I did this once and almost started a riot! Its amazing how the normally staid Brits can get all worked up if you irritate them in the right way!

 

[AcronymAllergy]

For listing in the references section, I'd be inclined to leave things exactly as they are in the original source.

 

[Ollie123]

I would absolutely leave journal names as is. It is a proper noun, that shouldn't be "translated" anymore than author names should. Format the text however you want, but if you directly quote someone I would use whatever spellings they used.

Truthfully though, this is probably not worth worrying about. Copyeditors shouldn't have to fix poorly written papers, but they are around to fix trivial BS like this if the journal has some devout belief that it should be one or the other. With the internet age everyone is used to reading journals from both US and Europe so I doubt anyone who matters would even notice.

 

[deadmau5]

yes leave journal names as they are

one that always gets me is BRAT - Behaviour/Behavior Research and Therapy

 

[sgcraig]

Leave the journal name as is. You are getting off easy on this one! As a Canadian, it actually drives me nuts that I have to change the spelling of words in my manuscript to the American spelling because journals won't accept Canadian spelling. 🙂