[acabal]

SE editor in chief here. What you describe is incorrect. The only thing we do is very light sound-alike spelling modernization, like "to-night" -> "tonight". We do not do things like change from en-GB to en-US, replace old words with different modern words, or change text for "American readers", whatever that means. I have no idea where you got that impression.

I personally worked on the Forsyte saga. If you think something was done in error, please let us know and we'll be happy to fix it.

[mrob]

I commented on this kind of editing several years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16957359

The edit is still in place, and I still maintain that changing 'phone to phone in dialogue changes the meaning.

[jeltz]

Yeah, that edit clearly changes the meaning of the text.

[natex]

> The only thing we do is very light sound-alike spelling modernization, like "to-night" -> "tonight".

Curious. Why even bother?

[bell-cot]

Guess: screen readers and such.

[tangledhelix]

One could argue that this falls into the previous poster's thought about "the little differences to modern English are part of the charm" ...