# Talk:Translating The Lord of the Rings

This article is a text article whose focus is to discuss the complex issues of how to translate The Lord of the Rings. We have a matching list article, List of translations of The Lord of the Rings, and we certainly should not have a text article with virtually the same title. The "Translations of ... " title would wrongly imply that the article just listed the translations that had been made, and maybe commented on their dates or publishers or bibliographic value. This article is emphatically not that sort of thing — that's for the list. Instead, this article looks in detail at the challenge Tolkien (unintentionally) posed to his translators by making the text, specifically its use of names with elaborate etymologies and its embedded and inter-related languages, extremely complicated. The "Translations of ..." title completely fails to capture the fact, therefore, that the article is about the challenge of "Translating...". We have a good and appropriate title here, and we should not switch to one that is bad and inappropriate; and especially not to one that would also promote maximum confusion with the existing list article. Chiswick Chap (talk) 10:06, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

@Chiswick Chap, @Amakuru has not just moved the page, but also merged the list into the article. I don't see anything wrong with separating list and prose, so I have reverted the merge. —Kusma (talk) 10:16, 3 July 2024 (UTC)
Thank you. Chiswick Chap (talk) 10:19, 3 July 2024 (UTC)
@Kusma and Chiswick Chap: There is no good reason why this should have been split. The page is not long, the list is not long, they belong in one place. You should have discussed this before taking such a radical step and I'm not sure why you would think this is uncontroversial.  — Amakuru (talk) 10:20, 3 July 2024 (UTC)
The question "should there be a standalone list" did come up after the split and was already discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of translations of The Lord of the Rings. —Kusma (talk) 10:25, 3 July 2024 (UTC)
Yes, the matter has been thoroughly discussed already. It might be more helpful to note that I could equally have created the 'Translating...' article separately (starting in my sandbox) and added a link from the "List of ...' article, which everyone would have thought entirely unexceptionable: the result is the same. On the articles' lengths, this article is over 80,000 bytes, not short by Wiki standards; and the list article, while containing less text obviously, occupies several pages of printout. There's precisely no reason, length, style, or content, to merge them again, and that would go against both the GA process and the AfD discussion. Chiswick Chap (talk) 10:32, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

As far as I know, this document has never been published as a single item, but always as a section or chapter of a larger work. Should it not therefore be rendered within quotes, rather than in italics? -- Verbarson  talkedits 08:08, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Yes.  --TaivoLinguist (Taivo) (talk) 13:23, 23 October 2024 (UTC)