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Originally Posted by Kyranger
Do you think that maybe Gandalf just translated 'Khazad-dum' as 'Moria' or was that what the doors actually said?
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It could have been Gandalf translating on the spot and substituting the name that would have been more familiar to most of the Fellowship, if Tolkien hadn't bothered to give us that drawing of the doors with the elvish inscription clearly saying
Ennyn Durin Aran Moria.
We briefly discussed this a while ago in the
Inconsistencies thread, where
Galin pointed out that the inscription also includes the Dwarf names
Durin and
Narvi, which can't have been on the 'real' door either, as Tolkien nicked them both from the Voluspa.
The same problem occurs with the epitaph on Balin's tomb, which even provides an English (instead of Westron) version written in Angerthas runes (although the use of
Moria is in this case historically justified). I guess we'll have to assume that in both cases what we see in the book isn't a facsimile of the 'real' inscriptions (or their representations in the original Red Book) but something tinkered with by the 'translator' who inserted the Old Norse names instead of their 'actual' Mannish names (in the language of Dale or something of the like).
This doesn't, however, solve the problem of
Moria, as this is not a 'translation' but a 'real' Elvish Middle-earth name - only one that wasn't used at the time the inscription was made. My best guess is that the Prof originally thought that Khazad-dűm had been called
Moria by the Elves all along, and when he later decided that it had been renamed after the waking of the Balrog it just never occurred to him to change the inscription accordingly.