These pages are still a work in progress.
To illustrate the different translations and allow comparison, I've included in this group of pages the first paragraph of the first chapter of the first book of the first volume (FR). Rather than choosing something more common, such as the Ring inscription, I've used this for two reasons. First, it is much easier to locate in any translation. Even partial translations always start with the beginning of the Fellowship. Second, it is prose text rather than poetic text and therefore is closer to illustrating more common grammatical and lexical choices than the somewhat artificial structures found in poetry. The order of examples is the same as the order on my shelves, which is roughly in order of families and subfamilies by geography, starting with my native language, English, on its home island of Great Britain and moving across Europe and Asia into the Pacific. (My native language also happens to be the original language of LOTR.)
Some translations have different translators for different parts of the LOTR or different translators for prose and poetry. I have listed here only the translator(s) of the passage in question.
Translations and transliterations are from ChatGPT. These translations are here to give an idea of the "flavor" of each attempt to render the English text into another language by the human translators. ChatGPT does tend to change the proper names in the source language to "Bilbo Baggins", "Hobbiton", etc., whether that is their form or not, but not always.
I have transcribed the original texts using Lexilogos rather than trying to copy and paste. I am fluent in using the Roman, Greek, Cyrillic, and Hebrew alphabets, so I'm confident that I have reproduced the scripts correctly for those. But for other writing systems, I have tried to carefully work through reproducing them using Lexilogos. I have undoubtedly made errors doing so.
I have ordered the samples in the order of translation when there are multiple translations into a single language. I used Wikipedia's list of translations for ordering and have mentioned translations that I do not have an example of at this time.
[Germanic] English, Frisian, Dutch, Afrikaans, German, Yiddish, Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish
[Balto-Slavic] Ukrainian, Belarusian, Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Croatian, Serbian, Slovenian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Lithuanian, Latvian
[Italic] French, Catalan, Spanish, Asturian, Portuguese, Galician, Italian, Romanian
[West Eurasian] Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Basque, Georgian, Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Uzbek, Mongolian