I'm a bit sad to learn Tolkien had so much against translating his names, because the Finnish translator, for example, has done awesome job there.
LotR was first read to me in Finnish when I was a kid, and I read it several times in Finnish myself before daring to read it in English. The Finnish translation was great back then, and even now when I have read the original several times too, there's little to complain of.
I have to agree with
H-I though about good translators necessarily creating a different story or poem in the case of LotR. And they can even serve different functions. For me,
The Lord of the Rings is a grand epic I love, filled with breathtakingly beautiful language but
Taru Sormusten Herrasta is my second home.
The original strikes me as more "high" and the epic moments are more epic, and this might simply be because it someitmes uses words that are unfamiliar to me so they sound really epic and also because I'm inlicned to think things are inclined to sound less ridiculous in a foreign language. I mean, in a few moments the Finnish translation made me grit my teeth a little last time I read it simply because it was so epic it was in the brink of being ridiculous, but I never get the same feeling when I'm reading
LotR in English. Also, some of the songs and poems just sound better in English even though the man who translated the poems into Finnish did a splendid job - probably partly because English is a much easier language to write poems in because words rhyme so much more than in Finnish.
On the other hand, in the Finnish version the characters and their internal struggles come so much closer to me. It might be the familiarity, of course, but it might also be some qualities of the language. I think it's also because sometimes you can't translate Finnish to be as epic/old-fashioned/poetic/formal as English. For example, whether a character says in the original "I don't know" or "I know not" it is translated into Finnish as the same phrase (there is no way to say "I know not" instead of "I don't know") and it makes some of the characters seem more down-to-earth, but not in a bad way, if you ask me. After all, it's still not the same as the poor German hobbits or anything.
All in all, I think the Finnish translation is very good because it sounds effortless - as if
LotR had originally been written in Finnish. (For example there is a Finnish word for all the races except hobbits, it always makes me cringe when I see for example the word "elf" in the middle of non-English text. In Finnish "elf" is
haltia and "goblin" is
hiisi, both of them old Finnish words. "Orc" has become
örkki, which sounds like a Finnish word and even more orcish than "orc" and "hobbit" has become
hobitti to fit the Finnish language.) I'm happy to have both the versions to read, because they mean different things to me and I love them both. The only problem of course is that every time I read it in Finnish I wish I had started reading it in English instead and the other way around...
