No matter how many Game of Thrones theories you've read, we bet you've never quite ironed out this detail.
This season we learned how Hodor got his name. In the revelatory, tragic scene, we see Hodor shouting "hold the door" over and over. The words gradually merge until they become his two-syllable name: "Hodor." But have you ever wondered how the series made that crucial language-based plot point work in other languages?
An ambitious Imgur user who goes by HooptyDooDooMeister rounded up 21 versions of the line in different languages, as Winter Is Coming discovered. The examples range from French to Danish to Mandarin to Farsi. And the success of the phonetic trick varies wildly by language, depending on how closely related it is to English. Translators for Germanic languages (like Danish) and romance languages (like Italian) had it relatively easy. Others had to get a little more creative.
For example, for Turkey, the writers changed the phrase "hold the door" to "stay there," which translates into "orada dur" in Turkish. That was contracted into "ordi dur," then "ordur," and then, finally, "Hodor." For other languages, like Japanese, a smooth translation was virtually impossible. (They pretty much gave up.) Click through the gallery below to see all 21 versions.
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