Tolkien Translations

[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").