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How Game of Thrones got around the Hodor 'hold the door' translation issue in 21 languages

'Pas au-dehors!'

Christopher Hooton
Wednesday 10 August 2016 09:39 BST
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The people in charge of subtitles/dubbing on Game of Thrones’ international version must have had the “well, sh*t” moment of the century when they first got to see season 6 episode ‘The Door’.

It, of course, saw (spoiler alert, if you’re seriously that far behind) Hodor’s name revealed to be a contraction of the English phrase “hold the door”, presenting a problem for foreign broadcasters.

This week, Entertainment Weekly rounded up a series of stills collated by Imgur user HoopyDooDooMeister (nice) showing the solutions to the problem.

They range from the ingenious - French: “Pas au-dehors!” (“Not outside!”) and Italian: “Blocca l’orda!” (“Block the horde!”) - to the pretty clunky - Polish: “Zahamuj dwych, ill możesz!” (“Hold the dead as long as you can!”).

The Imgur post proved very popular, but the OP admitted to having sourced a lot of the translations from Open Subtitles. If you happened to see the episode in a foreign language country, do please let us know how it was handled in the official broadcast below.

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