The French translation of LOTR isn't bad, and a lot of care went into it, with Tolkien's help. It's quite "dated", though. It was done while it was still the fashion to give foreign works a proper French literary style, rather than the more literal translations attempting to render the feeling of the other language.

The big surprise when I read LOTR in English was "the Englishness" of Tolkien, that added a lot to the pleasure of reading the book. That was quite a bit lost in translation (not as bad as with Harry Potter though, the translation totally ruins Rowling's style and humour and is also far more puerile than her English. I spent one terrible afternoon with nothing to do but skim through these books in French).

The other Tolkien books (Silmarillion, and especially the Lost Tales) were very badly translated, though.

I vaguely remembers there's a new translation of Tolkien that came out around the time of the movies. Not that I intend to ever read it.



Ah yeah... we don't have that problem in Montréal, though it's not what it used to be while Nebula was still in busines either.

The big book stores care little for SF/Fantasy. Their sections look big, but that's largely because there's tons of copies from series like Jordan/Brooks/Martin/Erikson/Goodkind/KJA and company and the real crap like Forgotten Realms, the SW expanded universe and so on that sells a lot.

For the lesser sold and older stuff (Wolfe, Philip José Farmer etc.), I frequently have to special order too, which I didn't have to in Nebula's days. It's there in a week at most, though. But the delays aren't in Sherbrooke alone. At Renaud-Bray, they expected to get TGS around the end of november. What they explained to me was that it's in part the Ontarian distributors's fault (their orders aren't processed in priority) and in part theirs (as they don't have the books shipped as ordered either. They get a shipment a month, or when there's X books from that distributor ready to ship. TGS had missed the mid October shipment, so they wouldn't get it only with the mid-november one, *if* the distributor had processed their order by then.

Just don't ever try to get reading advice about SF/Fantasy in the big stores. All they can tell you is what sells. I miss Nebula a lot for that.