It helps us to understand Edwards’s determination to convey the original’s every aspect and nuance, and to preserve its local setting in its entirety.
Edwards insists on the Dutch context and language of the episode we looked at. He breaks with his predecessors who made the name of the protagonist transparent in English as ‘Drystubble’ and reinstates the original ‘Droogstoppel’. The setting remains emphatically Dutch, with street names (among other things) as reminders. Droogstoppel’s metalinguistic comments are rendered in such a way that we are not reminded of English.
The concern with accuracy in Edwards’s version shows also in such things as the slightly pedantic insistence that the ‘Shawlman’ of the earlier versions should be a ‘Scarfman’, and in the fulsomeness of the footnote explaining the social connotations of ‘Juffrouw’ and ‘Mevrouw’.