Why is Tolkiens work, The Lord of the Rings in particular, so difficult to translate (into other languages of our world)?
Because his interest in, skill with, and love of language are manifest at every level and indeed in almost every word of LotR, thereby producing a result difficult if not impossible to duplicate. The previous question describes how Common Speech names were “rendered” into English. The Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s instructions for translators, does attempt to address this. In it he goes down the list of names in the index and specifies which should be translated (being Common Speech) and which should be left alone. It would require skillful translation to get even this far, but that would only be the beginning. Reproducing the other linguistic intricacies described in the previous question would be well-nigh impossible; for example, Rohirric would have to be replaced with some ancient language whose relation to the language of translation was the same as that of Anglo-Saxon to modern English. On another level, there is the diction and style of everything said a
