On Friday, RJ and Terry Pratchett were interviewed by RJ’s Dutch translators, Jo Thomas and Johan-Martijn Flaton, at the Donner bookstore in Rotterdam. Apparently his Dutch translators are the only translators who actually get in touch with him about details, and I think the Dutch translations for the WoT books are quite good and close to the English text. The bad news is of course that now the translators have met the creator, the Dutch translation for Winter’s Heart (which was supposed to be released in April) has been pushed back until July. I do wonder what details they did overlook…
Anyway, I was looking forward to this interview. And the questions were original, but unfortunately Terry Pratchett had a way of not answering them, going on and on for hours until nobody knew where he was going anymore, and then RJ would pick up on something Pratchett had said which would be interesting, but miles away from the original question. I had hoped to get an answer about his idea of translations (the question to Pratchett was something like “Are you afraid of translations, that things or names or ideas get lost in process?”), but even Pratchett himself never even got close to answering that. Oh well. It was an interesting interview still, about the creative process of writing, how details grow to become important later in the story, how he created the world for WoT, why he doesn’t read fan fiction, things like that. It was crowded, I think over 200 people were there, and it turned out that about three quarter of them wanted a Pratchett signature, so the queue for RJ was much smaller and even allowed me to go back twice.
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