Translating The Lord of the Rings

J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings has been translated, with varying degrees of success, into dozens of languages from the original English. He was critical of some early versions, and made efforts to improve translation by providing a detailed "Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings", alongside an appendix "On Translation" in the book itself.

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. A specific difficulty is the elaborate relationship between some of the real and invented languages used in the book. Westron, the common speech of Middle-earth, is "translated" as modern English; this stands in relation to Rohirric, an archaic language, which is represented by Old English, and the language of Dale, translated as Old Norse. The three real languages are related. 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.

Tolkien, an expert in Germanic philology, scrutinized those that were under preparation during his lifetime, and made comments on early translations that reflect both the translation process and his work. To aid translators, and because he was unhappy with the work of early translators such as Åke Ohlmarks with his Swedish version,^[1] Tolkien wrote his "Guide" in 1967; it was released publicly in 1975 in A Tolkien Compass, and again, retranscribed, in the 2005 book The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion.

Linguists have examined translations into several languages, noting the specific difficulties in each case, and the choices and errors that translators have made. Later versions in each language have benefited from the choice of adapting and correcting early versions, or of starting afresh. For instance, Margaret Carroux's careful German version was criticised by Wolfgang Krege, who made a new translation, for using a similar linguistic style for the speech of both elves and hobbits, despite the marked differences in the original, while Luis Domènech rendered the working class hobbits' non-standard English into accurate but standard Spanish. 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.