Game of Thrones ‘Hold The Door’: A Translators Nightmare
‘Hold the door’ became Hodor, and ‘Tenir la porte’ became… Hodor?
Fans of the popular TV show ‘Game of Thrones’ will never forget the beloved simpleton, who carried Bran on his back like a human chariot, and will most likely still cry whenever someone so much as whispers a request for them to ‘hold the door.’
Hodor was a much-loved character on the show, whether it was because of the fact that all he could say was his name, or because he was the only character incapable of evil thoughts, but like most things on Game of Thrones, if you love it… It will most likely get killed off in the most gruesome of ways possible.
Translating ‘Hold the door!’
But one issue arose when the story behind Hodor’s name was revealed, and translators all over the world collectively cried, and not just at the death of another much-loved character.
In English, it is easy to see how the phrase ‘hold the door’ eventually becomes ‘Hodor’, as the words are easily melded together, however in other languages, this is not necessarily the case. As can be seen above, a direct French translation of the phrase is ‘tenir la porte’, which you couldn’t feasibly meld together to make ‘Hodor’ no matter how hard you tried.
So how do you get around issues such as this? After all, language is complex and translating languages, even more so. There is grammar to consider, and some languages do not even have words for certain things!
Below is a list of how certain languages tackled the translations.
French – “Qu’ils n’aillent pas au-dehours!” (Don’t let them get outside!)
Italian – “Blocca l’orda!” (Block the horde!)
German – “Halte das Tor!” (Hold the gate!)
Spanish – “Obstruye el corredor!” (Black the passage!)
Polish – “Zahamuj dwych, ile mozesz!” (Hold the dead as long as you can!)
Translating is a most difficult job, which is why it’s important to not only know the language well but to also be effectively creative when issues such as this arise. Certain terms will not always have a direct translation, and sometimes when it does, it may have lost some, or even most of it’s meaning.
Adelphi’s Translators
Remember, when looking for a translation, it’s always better to find a qualified translator. Adelphi’s translators always translate into their native language to ensure the highest quality and most accurate possible translations.
Does your project have an issue regarding translation similar to that of the above? Our translators are more than qualified to find the best solution.
Written by – Hannah Sun
Video translation and subtitling service
Video translations and subtitle localization company offering transcriptions, SRT and STL subtitle translations, on-screen text and graphics localization
Our video translation and subtitling service include the transcription and translation of the audio, on-screen text and any other support materials that go with the video, while also ensuring the subtitles are culturally appropriate.
Adelphi Studio is the multimedia division of Adelphi Translations Ltd., a full-service translation agency and we have translated and subtitled films and videos in over 80 languages from Arabic to Welsh. We are committed to offering a comprehensive and flexible service to suit your requirements and budget. We have a history of producing high-quality subtitling, voice-overs, and typeset print materials, meaning we can handle all of your projects’ multimedia requirements in-house. We also offer Articulate Storyline localization for your e-learning projects.
So if you are looking for a Video translation company that can handle the whole process from start to finish, delivering your project on time whilst offering advice on fonts and styles for your subtitles, then Adelphi Studio is the company for you.
Subtitle styles
There are various ways of producing subtitles to display on your video. We can advise you on the best option for yourselves and even produces samples for you to choose from. We can also advise on the best fonts to use too.
Click here to see some samples of subtitle styles
On-Screen Text Localization
As well as producing the subtitles we can also localize any on-screen text into any language. Depending on the complexity and how the original text was produced we may require the data package it was made in.
Transcription Services
We also offer a transcription service for those customers lacking a transcript of their videos. We provide time-coded scripts of your videos that are ready to be translated. We will then use those translations for the subtitle text, sending you the files at each stage of the process for you to review and assess.
Your projects will be supported by a team of experienced and meticulous project managers, we are also happy to work with any translations you provide. Our experience in our field means we can advise you on technical issues like font selection for more challenging languages.
Adelphi has offices in the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States of America (USA). For all UK and International inquiries please contact our UK office tel: +44 (0)114 272 3772 or email: sales@adelphistudio.com. For US, Canada, and South America inquiries please contact our office in California tel: 916 414 8714 or email: us@adelphistudio.com
Bengali Voice Artist on Adelphi Studio
Bengali voice artist Avik
“Avik is a Professional Bengali voice talent based in India. He has lent his voice for National Geographic, Channel Bengali, Fox Life Bengali, Discovery Bengali.”
Avik is interested in developing his career in the field of media, having done a Six month UGC approved Radio Production course at Jadavpu University, he is now currently working as a radio presenter.
His venture into lending his voice for voice-over opportunities has seen him working with companies such as National Geographic, and further lending his voice to various TV shows.
Voice artist selection made easy
1, First choose your language
2, Filter the level of professional experience, dialect. and gender.
4, Click the + to add voices to favorites and these will automatically be included in your quote request.
5, Fill out the rest of the form and we will get back to you with a quote.
Bengali voice artists :
Select a language from the drop-down menu
Male
Female
Adelphi Studio is a multilingual voice over services agency producing foreign language voice-overs in over 75 languages with over 1,200 voice artists.
From Arabic to Yoruba we have the foreign language voice over talent to suit your production and budget. With more voice samples to choose from than other agencies offering a great range of foreign language voice-over artists to meet your expectations. We also have over 120 foreign accent English speaking voice artists to choose from.
Adelphi offices
Adelphi Studio offers subtitling and voice over services globally from our offices in the UK and the USA.
All US, Canadian, and South American inquiries should be directed to our US office while all other inquiries should go to our UK office.
UK Office
Tel : +44 (0)114 272 3772
Email: sales@adelphistudio.com
US Office
Tel : 916 414 8714
Email: us@adelphistudio.com
Chinese Typesetting and Chinese fonts
Using Chinese fonts in Chinese typesetting
Adelphi has been producing Chinese printed materials for over 20 years; our own in-house typesetting studio produces Chinese typesetting for regular clients such as Disney, HMI Market, the Overseas Development Institute, Hutchison Whampoa Hong Kong and Barclays Bank, to name a few.
Examples of Chinese typesetting by Adelphi
Traditional (Cantonese) and Simplified (Mandarin) Chinese
The terms “Mandarin” and “Cantonese” refer to spoken Chinese languages, whereas “Traditional” and “Simplified” refers to different writing systems. Mandarin is the official spoken language in mainland China and is written in Simplified script, while Cantonese is used in Hong Kong, Macau and the province Guangdong Hong Kong-based written Cantonese and the Taiwanese variety of Mandarin Chinese both use Traditional characters.
Chinese fonts
Chinese fonts broadly fall into two categories just like Western fonts do. We have serif and sans-serif: think of Arial and Times New Roman. Chinese, on the other hand, has Song (宋体) and Hei (黑体). Where Song is the Chinese equivalent of serif, Hei is akin to sans-serif.
Licensed fonts
Legally, to print your materials for use in the PRC, you must be using fonts that are licensed for use in the territory; otherwise, you will be breaking the licensing agreement of the font manufacturer. Adelphi has over 100 fully-licensed Monotype fonts for use in the PRC.
To see a list of our fully licensed Chinese fonts please click here. There are many manufacturers of Chinese fonts and thousands are available online for free, but you should be careful of these as many have been copied from established font houses and are therefore not licensed for use in mainland China.
The font manufacturer pays the Chinese government for these fonts to be licensed and if you’re not paying to use these, then the Chinese government is not being paid. It’s generally unwise to upset the Chinese government or your client, after all.
To produce and release a professional font, the font house has to create a character set of at least 20,000 characters and ideally, they have to do it twice: once for simplified and once for traditional. This is, as you can imagine, a lot of work. Western fonts do not even come close to this, even with the addition of extended characters and symbols.
“If a font of Simplified Chinese is installed into any electronic product for export to the People’s Republic of China, it is necessary to use a font that is authenticated by the Chinese government“.
Many typesetting companies and their clients ignore the licensing agreements and just use any font they have, which can be very risky. Obviously, when dealing with clients such as Disney for their Chinese materials as we have, all work must be above board: therefore we only use fonts that are fully-licensed for use in the PRC. If the fonts are not licensed, you will be in danger of hurting your client legally and financially.
Arabic typesetting and Arabic fonts
Arabic fonts when typesetting
Adelphi has been producing Arabic printed materials for over 20 years, our own in-house typesetting studio produces Arabic typesetting for regular clients such as Vidal Sassoon, HMI Market, the Overseas Development Institute, HSBC and Barclays Bank to name just a small selection.
Many of the products we produce are of course business orientated and the demand for stylistic Arabic fonts is not often requested and many are happy to use Arial or Times New Roman. But some clients do have specific requirements such as Jaguar Land Rover specified the use of Tahoma and others like Amnesty International have their own Arabic font based on Helvetica.
The most common style of Arabic used is called Nashk and this is used in most Arabic newspapers and other commercial printed materials. There are other styles but these are not used in most everyday commercial Arabic materials.
The five principal Arabic calligraphic cursive styles:
1. Naskh (نسخ nasḫ)
2. Nasta‘liq (نستعلیق nastaʿlīq)
3. Diwani (ديواني dīwānī)
4. Thuluth (ثلث ṯuluṯ)
5. Ruq‘ah (رقعة ruqʿah)
Arabic fonts available:
There are many “Font Houses” that specialise in fonts for specific languages and even Microsoft have their own Arabic range. Recently an Arabic font has been created called Dubai and it was commissioned by the city of Dubai itself and is free to download and use. Some of the bigger font houses such as Monotype have a large selection of Arabic fonts to choose from but please read the license as some of these can be restrictive.
Common problems when typesetting Arabic
Arabic letters are generally not written separately but joined to each other in groups or entire words and unless an Arabic reading software is used then the characters will split into their components.
The example below shows the word ‘August’ in Arabic. The top version is correct, however, the bottom version did not have Arabic InDesign support switched on and has thus been reversed and broken into separate components.
Also, most industry standard typesetting packages such as Indesign or QuarkXpress will not work with Arabic unless special versions are purchased or the World Ready Composer plugins are used to enable the right to left function. We use the latest version of Adobe InDesign enabled to work with Arabic and all other right to left languages.
What are Arabic numbers?
We often get asked to use Arabic numbers in the document but “Arabic numbers” most commonly refer to the numerals widely used in Europe and the Americas. e.g. 123456789. Whereas the client often wants us to use Arabic-Indic numbers. See the examples below.
Drop caps and uppercase for emphasis can look great in English, but some languages don’t use them, including Arabic. In these cases, we have to advise the designer the options to give the words a distinctive look without the English options.
Flipping the document from right to left
Arabic typesetting requires flipping the document so it reads right to left, also so it can be read with the correct pagination in place. This can be quite a time consuming if the English original has not been designed with this in mind. The World Ready Composer plugin has a reverse document option but it isn’t perfect and every page has to be checked for consistency.
