Translating The Lord of the Rings
The complexity of the book, the nature of Tolkien's prose style with its archaisms, and the many names of characters and places combine to make translation into any language a challenge.
The scholar of literature Thomas Honegger gives possible solutions for this in French and German, but suggests that the small amount of Old English is probably best left untranslated.
Translations have sometimes adopted a domesticating approach: for instance, the first Russian version to be printed substitutes secret police and armed escort for Tolkien's far gentler English policemen.
J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) was an English Roman Catholic writer, poet, philologist, and academic, best known as the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
Allan Turner gives the example of fronting, where Tolkien puts the object at the start of a sentence rather than after the verb: "Weapons they have laid at your doors".
[13] Further, it led to the only occasion on which Tolkien agreed to be the guest of honour at a "Hobbit-maaltijd", in Rotterdam in March 1958, at the invitation of Cees Oubouter of the bookseller Voorhoeve & Dietrich.
On the other hand, Beregond notes, Ohlmarks failed to use harg for the cognate "harrow" in Dunharrow, or skog for "shaw" in Trollshaws, things that "should have been obvious".
[22] Where Ohlmarks had rendered Rivendell as Vattnadal ("Waterdale"), or Treebeard as Lavskägge ("Lichenbeard"), Andersson used Riftedal and Trädskägge, far closer in meaning to Tolkien.
Andersson cuts down Ohlmarks's name for Mount Doom, Domedagsberget ("Judgement Day Mountain") to the simpler and more direct translation Domberget.
[28] The first Italian version, of The Fellowship of the Ring only, by Vittoria Alliata di Villafranca, aged only 17 at the time, was brought out by Mario Ubaldini's Edizione Astrolabio in 1967.
The literary critic Cesare Catà on the other hand compared it unfavourably to Alliata's version, saying that it was dry and humdrum, to be categorised not as epic but as Young Adult fiction.
Among numerous examples that he analyses, Savelli objects, for instance, to the phrase organizzate attività di sussistenza ("organized subsistence activities"), which in his view is far too modern and technical for the context:[32] The Italian Association for Tolkien Studies comments that Fatica's version has triggered years of debate between supporters of the two versions, but that this has had the merit of getting people in Italy to think about Tolkien's style of writing.
The Frankfurt-based Margaret Carroux qualified for the German version published by Klett-Cotta on the basis of her translation of Tolkien's short story "Leaf by Niggle", that she had made solely to give him a sample of her work.
Tolkien endorsed the Gouw of the Dutch version and remarked that German Gau "seems to me suitable in Ger., unless its recent use in regional reorganization under Hitler has spoilt this very old word."
The translation met a mixed reception; critics felt that he took too many liberties in modernising the language of the Hobbits into the linguistic style of late 1990s German.
Even the fantasy genre was poorly understood: fantaisie translates to "whim or fancy", while The Lord of the Rings is not fantastique, fantastical, Ferré insists, but merveilleux, full of wonders.
[38] Ledoux makes another mistake, in Ferré's view, in explicitly mentioning God where Tolkien carefully avoids doing that, as in Dieu le bénisse for "Bless him".
[42] The first translation to appear in print was Vladimir Muravyov and Andrey Kistyakovsky's (1982–1992); the linguist and Tolkien scholar Mark Hooker describes this as "a very much russified version".
[42] He takes as an example their rendering of the Shirriff-leader's speech to the four homecoming hobbits after their quest: Hooker comments that the whole 1982 text is "much more full of doom and gloom" than the original.
[42] He describes the rendering of the Shirrif-leader's speech as an "imitation of a Russian policeman making an arrest", calling it "an elegant equal" to Tolkien's "English bobby".
The term "Generalissimo" was used only of the dictator Stalin; Hooker notes that the translators went even further in the same chapter, using the highly-charged word Вождь ("Vozhd") for Tolkien's "Boss".
[44] The first translation of The Lord of the Rings into Hebrew (שר הטבעות, Sar ha-Tabbaot) was made by Canaanite movement member Ruth Livnit, aided by the poet Uriel Ofek for the verse, in 1977.
[46] Danny Orbach writes that older Tolkien fans like Livnit's "old, traditional, and literary Hebrew" full of mythological, "mostly Biblical" terms.
Livnit made no reference to Tolkien's legendarium, and therefore either inaccurately translated or dropped parts of the story relating to events in The Silmarillion and The Hobbit.
The linguist Sandra Bayona writes that the translation often renders the speech of characters such as working-class hobbits in grammatically correct Spanish, where Tolkien used non-standard English.
These include duplicating the subject ("Mr. Drogo, he married..."), double negatives ("Talking won't mend nothing"), altered subject-verb agreement ("'Elves and dragons!'
A rare exception, writes Bayona, is the coinage medoreando instead of standard Spanish merodeando to represent "trapessing"; she comments "it certainly marks Ham [Gamgee] in the eyes of the reader.
Li states that Ding et al's version may be more literary, at the cost of making it "sound like a traditional Chinese wuxia [martial arts fiction] story".
Chu translates the chapter title "A Knife in the Dark" rather directly (黑暗中的小刀, Hēi'àn zhōng de xiǎodāo), whereas Ding et al render it more elaborately (夤夜劍光, Yínyè jiàn guāng, "The light of the sword in the night").
Eric Reinders comments that Aragorn fits this mould well, while others like Boromir, Gandalf, Legolas, and Gimli "loosely" approximate it; but the anti-heroic hobbits absolutely do not.
