It looks like Fr. Peter is right in his comments on his Cork Irish blog, about the non idiomatic translation of this story. Scholar Nicholas Williams appeared to give the translation a good effort, but it failed by not having sufficient editorial review to correct the errors. I actually see a lot of this when I talk to bright, intelligent foreigners who learned English in schools. They often have a very good vocabulary, however word order, idiom and pronunciation escape them. Their English-ish language is understandable but difficult at best.
Nevertheless, I’m rewriting this review in a more positive direction since it is still teaching me a lot about Irish. And I’m learning that Irish is actual a group of similar dialects which has yet to have any grand unification of consensus.
In other places I’ve commented on the grand anarchy of the language. Tolkien never was comfortable with it himself, as it is not constructed like the Germanic nor Scandinavian languages. So he could never have translated it himself as well as did Williams.
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