Proper names in the translation of The Lord of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings is a multilingual trilogy which includes texts and lexical units of eight languages that are represented by means of the Roman alphabet and diacritics. This study scrutinizes the problem with translations of proper names. This includes an analysis of Tolkien’s languages and their phonetic system. The results obtained embrace sound value of graphemes as well as pronunciation rules and are used to compare proper names in the original with interpretations by Ukrainian and Russian translators, raising the question of phonetic correspondence in translation. The novel suffered much in translations because of various alternations and substitutions. Many proper names were misunderstood and therefore rendered incorrectly.