I read many American books as a child/teen before I managed to figure out what "bangs" meant in relation to hair. It didn't put me off reading. I just took it that it meant some strange American hair thing and carried on reading.
Exactly. I read loads of books as a kid, not only from other countries, but from other time periods (those can have some odd and archaic vocabulary of their own). What I couldn't work out from context, I just filed away as "new word that means... something...maybe I'll figure it out later."
I was in college when the Harry Potter books came out, and I remember being appalled to learn that the US releases had been "translated" into American. (Even the freakin TITLE! They figured Americans wouldn't be familiar with the legend of the "philosopher's stone" so they changed it to "sorcerer's stone.")
Frankly, I found it rather insulting. Did publishers think Americans were too stupid to learn a few new words? Too lazy? But let's pretend, for the sake of argument, that they were right, and not one American child would have understood the reference. How was changing it to something completely made up any better? If you're going to learn new vocabulary when reading fantasy anyway (and whatever they called the stone in question, the child reading would learn about a new object with special properties specific to the story itself), why not go with the author's original vision and use the vocabulary that actually means something? This is a story with Quiddich and muggles and countless other made-up words... but real words that happen to be used used elsewhere in the world were deemed too difficult and confusing?
Part of the fun of growing up is discovering that something you believed was completely fictional is actually based in reality. Madeleine L'Engle, in particular, blew my mind with this. I read her works in elementary school, and when I got older, I was like "Holy moly! Tesseracts and mitochondria are real things and not just funny words she invented for her stories?! I should read more about them!"
It's not just books, etiher. When I was in college, I discovered that a lot of people had no idea that the roadrunner wasn't just a fictional bird invented by Warner Bros. As I grew up in the US southwest, where they're common, it became one of my go-to icebreaker topics. I can't count how many times I heard, "Holy crap...roadrunners are REAL?! and they kill SNAKES?!" (This got even odder when I moved to Italy, where those same cartoons, lacking an Italian word for "roadrunner," called the cartoon character a
struzzo (ostrich).
I think they stopped with the HP "translations" after the first few books (I'd have to double-check), but the fact that the publisher felt the need to do that in the first place was just bizarre.