Nice playing the devil's advocate,
Aiwendil.
Anyway I still (surprise surprise) disagree, partly because of what
Galadriel said, partly for other reasons.
Partly it's something that is possibly totally invalid as an argument but works in my head nevertheless. In most cases, English doesn't have the same kind of atmosphere and character to me than other languages, it's not exotic or "characteristic". It's a pity but I think it's simply because English is so universal and because I know it too well (there's no big difference in how many obscure names I don't understand in the Finnish version and in the English version of LotR, for example), so names like "Baggins" would feel kind of lame in a text that was in Finnish. Can't really explain it any better than that!
Maybe that English names themselves are not enough to convey a sense of "Englishness" to me since they are what I see everywhere. To get the sense of "Englishness" I need more like certain atmosphere, way of phrasing things, dialogue. And once the text itself is translated into Finnish it's not a question of the names whether the text retains its "Englishness" - it's more about how well the translator has managed to convey the atmosphere. And it worked at least for me: now the Shire feels both English and familiar to me when I read LotR in Finnish - when I read it in English it doesn't feel familiar the same way but it's just a tad more English. Wondering if this makes sense...
And lastly and possibly more importantly, I really don't like reading novels where stuff has to be explained with footnotes. Sometimes it's ok, but I'm just trying to imagine the amount of footnotes required for
LotR. Explaining things like Bilbo saying he comes from a bag or why there is "G" in the box Galadriel gives to Sam in footnotes is kind of lame - it breaks the illusion of the story when you have to look up some factual explanation to get a joke or a point...