After six seasons of only saying some variant of the syllables ‘ho’ and ‘dor’ on the HBO fantasy epic Game of Thrones, the show’s writers finally revealed the origin of the name of the character played by Northern Irish actor Kristian Nairn. *SPOILER WARNING* The gentle giant exited the show in a time-bending sequence that saw his younger version interacting with a spiritual Bran Stark in the past, while adult Hodor barricaded a now-catatonic Bran from an onslaught of zombies. All while shouting “Hodor! Hodor,” a shortened version of “Hold the door.”
The moment was a tragic standout for millions of fans across the world, but presented a Hodor-sized challenge for translators who needed to find a way to interpret it. Imgur user HooptyDooDooMeister, presumably George RR Martin’s second choice for the origins of Hodor, has compiled 21 different versions of the reveal from the international iterations of Game of Thrones to reveal how it was done. In Spanish, for instance, the translators reworded the line as Obstruye el corredor, which means ‘block the passage’, which lead rather nicely to “O... dor.”
Germanic languages, which form a linguistic family with English, had the easiest time, with the German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian versions all following the same structure, but when it came to Finnish, one of the most linguistic outliers in Europe, all bets were off. You can see how the translators pulled off the tricky scene in the gallery below: