A story I heard Philip K Dick tell about Man in High Castle was he got very interested in the German and Japanese translations, to an extent that he got ahold of the German translation and went through it in two nights with an English/German dictionary and was appalled by rewrites (like references to Wyatt Earp that weren’t in the book, though he said there weren’t any changes to the historical/political perspective.) From the Japanese publisher he supposedly got told off about how his wasn’t any good, how he confused Chinese and Japenese culture, etc.
Made me wonder if there were stories of other authors who get invested like this. Did Tolkein care deeply about translations of LotR or did he dismiss anything that wasn’t in his mother tongue, since the books are to a large degree such a love letter to English? Did Frank Herbert worry that Dune would be a joke when it was translated into Arabic when there are a bunch of Arab words in it? Etc.
by DoubleTFan