Tolkien Translations

[Mariska Greenleaf]

Time to revive this most interesting thread! (Thank you Guinevere for showing me the way )

My mothertongue is Dutch, and the first time I read the LOTR it was in my native language. To be honest, the names of places and persons sounded somewhat strange to me. As said before, everything has been translated, and in most cases certainly not for the best.

But I recall that Tolkien worked very close together with the Dutch translator.
It was Firnantoonion who mentioned this in the topic Translation mistakes
Although I'm going to look for some more information concerning that matter.

All the more strange that Tolkien apparently allowed the translator to use Dutch words for the places and names of persons.

Edit: The Dutch translator's name is Max Schuchart, he translated the LOTR in 1957. But that's about everything I could find with Google about this.

[Luthien_ Tinuviel]

If you have Letters, #190 deals with the Dutch translations, which Tolkien strongly objected to. A few excerpts:

In principle I object as strongly as is possible to the 'translation' of the nomenclature at all (even by a competent person). I wonder why a translator should think himself called on or entitled to do any such thing. That this is an 'imaginary' world does not give him any right to remodel it according to his fancy, even if he could in a few months create a new coherent structure which it took me years to work out.

And then.....

May I say now at once that I will not tolerate any similar tinkering with personal nomenclature. (He had been complaining about various place names poorly translated into Dutch when they needn't have been.) Nor with the name/word Hobbit. I will not have any more Hompen (in which I was not consulted), nor any Hobbel or whatnot. Elves, Dwarfs/ves, Trolls, yes: they are mere modern equivalents of the correct terms. But hobbit (and orc) are of that world, and they must stay, whether they sound Dutch or not.....

(Both from Letter #190, italics not my own, bolded note my own)

I speak Czech, and I haven't actually read any of the Czech translations, but from various Czech websites I've seen some of the changes that were made in translation. I don't approve of the decision to change "hobbit" to "hobit", like Tolkien said in the quotation above, it's not an English word which can be translated accordingly, and should be kept intact, even if it doesn't look Dutch (or Czech). Without the accents, Sam becomes Samved Krepelka, which I find absurd, and Baggins becomes Pytlík, which is even worse, "pytlík" meaning literally "bag" or "sack", and generally with connotations of the type of bag used to carry groceries or hold trash. What with Sam, his name becomes rather "Samknowledge," and I wonder that they didn't just translate it all the way, though that would have rendered it "Pulved," and his nickname would be Pul, which would be simply awful beyond words.

Even where things are translated well enough, or at least literally, which of course isn't always entirely the same thing, they sound so different and rather comical- like a children's book, as many of you have said. Somehow "Prsten Moci" doesn't carry the same ominous weight that "Ring of Power" does. And like akhtene said, the declensions are simply awful- "Vzpomínáte na první setkání hobita Bilba s úlisným Glumem?" Bilba? Glumem? Necessary, but quite sad. The problem lies in the fact that Tolkien was such an artist with words- their sounds and appearances add to their meaning and mood, which cannot be carried over successfully into another language, I think. One can achieve such an effect in any language, but I don't think one could get the same effect in one language as another- it's simply not possible. And translators seem to be rather lazy: when they encounter something that's difficult to translate, they take the easy way out by overly simplifying it. "Baggins" is quite hard to translate, but I think even "Bilbo Sáckový" would have been more normal, and even more natural in Czech, than "Bilbo Pytlík"! (Sácek being generally a small bag, he would thus be "Bilbo of the Bag" instead of "Bilbo Sack").

[Pitchwife]

I'm sure I must have seen this thread before but never got round to posting on it. Thanks for the reminder, Guinevere!

I, too, first read LotR, and the Silmarillion and The Hobbit, in German translation (the Carroux version). I read it in the original for the first time shortly thereafter, but for most of the 30 years since, my Tolkien experience was filtered through the translations, and although I read the Prof's works mostly in the original nowadays, somewhere in the back recesses of my mind Frodo's surname will always be Beutlin, and Elrond will always reside in Bruchtal (which is a fairly close translation of Rivendell, and never mind its hilarious similarity to the real town of Bruchsal in the region of Germany where I long lived).

Of course no translation can ever hope to capture every nuance of the original, but I still feel that Ms Carroux (and Ms von Freymann, who translated the poems!) has done an outstanding job, and I think her use of dated or archaic German words like bühl (for 'hill') or tobel (for 'dingle', as in Derndingle) would have pleased the Prof. The different stylistic registers in different parts of the book (like e.g. the colloquial hobbit-talk early in The Fellowship vs the more lofty heroic mode in parts of TT and RotK) come through quite clearly in her version, even if she didn't exactly mirror every occurrence of thou vs you in the original.

As for the Krege re-translation, don't get me started on that! He's proved himself to be a competent and indeed sensitive translator with his version of the Silmarillion, so it's a marvel to me how he ever could have screwed up so completely. (IIRC he even discussed in his afterword whether he shouldn't have rendered the Rohirric names with their Old High German cognates, to mirror the relation between Rohirric=Anglo-Saxon and Westron=ModernEnglish in the original, which clearly shows he did give some profound thought to his business.) I'm willing to acknowledge he probably was under some pressure from the editors to make his translation as different from the old one as possible, but still... anybody who can seriously think of using "na klar", "kichern" on the one hand and "hohe Frau" on the other hand (belonging to totally different stylistic registers in German) in the same sentence deserves to be hung by his thumbs.
(For native English readers who may not know what I'm talking about, this is like

'Yeah, sure', said the High Lady, giggling softly

vs Tolkien's

'Like as not', said the Lady with a gentle laugh.

)

One more thing I'd like to address is the translation of Hobbitish sur- and place names. I'm for translating them, if done well, and I think Ms Carroux handled that part very well indeed*, using some old German place name endings like -ingen, -binge, -büttel to match Tolkien's -ton, -delving, -bottle. It does away with the Englishness of the Shire, of course, but it does preserve the homeliness, which I think is just as important. Meaning that if I read Tolkien correctly, he meant the audience at which his books were first and foremost aimed (English, of course) to feel at home in the Shire - like it was, as someone (I think Lalwende?) said on I don't know which other thread, a familiar place not far away; after all, the Hobbits are the characters from whose perspective we experience most of the story, so we're supposed to identify with them, aren't we? Now for English readers, homeliness and Englishness are of course one and the same, but translators have to make a choice here - and personally, as a reader, I prefer for the Shire to feel like home to me.

*One thing where I disagree with her is her choice of rendering Shire itself as Auenland (literally 'meadow-land', which I suppose describes the landscape well enough but hasn't the same historical connotations). In a footnote to the Appendix on translation, she says that a better German equivalent to the English shire would have been Gau, but that she chose not to use that because of its perverted use by the Nazis (as in Gauleiter). There would have been, however, a perfect dialectal alternative in Gäu (basically the same word pronounced a little differently, and with no Nazi connotations whatsoever). Its usage is rather limited to the south-west of Germany, but seeing that she borrowed a lot from SW German for the rest of her nomenclature, that shouldn't have deterred her.

Now this post has got a lot longer and more rambling than I ever intended... blame the hour (close to 4am) and some bottles of good Czech beer!

[PrinceOfTheHalflings]

Interesting. I've read the Dutch translation, which isn't too bad.

The French translation is quite good - there's a couple of other decent ones too. The Danish, for example.

I wouldn't mind looking at the Icelandic translation, Hringadróttinssaga. It would be a pity if that was less than good. There's no doubt that it is a hard book to translate. Tolkien had a unique grasp of English. You are quite right about problems in the new German translation, Pitchwife. Tolkien went to a lot of trouble to finesse his dialogue to convey specific things about different characters, and it's a pity to see someone ride roughshod over it. It would be like "translating" the English Tolkien uses into a contemporary "street" version while still randomly retaining the occasional thou and thee.

I cringed a little at a comment on this thread, admittedly from 2003, which heaped scorn on Professor Shippey! Tom Shippey might not be right 100% of the time, but he knows a heck of a lot more about JRR Tolkien than almost anyone who isn't Christopher Tolkien.

[Guinevere]

Thank you for reviving my old thread, Pitchwife and PrinceOfTheHalflings!

I think my aversion to the German tranlation(s) and nomenklatura stem from the fact that I read the books first in English, and as an adult.
But I understand very well that, if somebody read and loved the translated version as a teenager, this first impression will remain dear to the heart.
(Btw, if the Shire should represent not "Englishness" but "homeliness" then for me the Hobbits should speak Swiss Dialect! In "Quotes in other languages" I did translate some Hobbit Quotes to my dialect. Orcs speech also works, but never the noble speech of Elves or Gondorians.)

[Pitchwife]

Originally Posted by Guinevere

Btw, if the Shire should represent not "Englishness" but "homeliness" then for me the Hobbits should speak Swiss Dialect!

And why not? After all, the Prof himself said (in Appendix F II) that

Hobbits indeed spoke for the most part a rustic dialect.

(Although I wonder whether Schwyzerdütsch shouldn't be more properly considered a language in its own right rather than a dialect... )

[Orofarne]

I found the Spanish translation somewhere, and I have been reading it off and on. After getting used to the shock of seeing one's favorite character say the kind of snarly sentence that is the nightmare of anyone speaking in their second language, I did notice some inconsistencies.
1) The poetry didn't rhyme. I suppose this is a good thing, but it is a shade disconserting.
2) Strider was Trancos. My dictionary says this means 'trunk'.
3) When I was reading both the translation and the original simotaneaously, I noticed that the sentences were not in the right order, which might confuse persons who only read the translation.
The translation was fun, but I'd cast my vote in favor of the real one.