Does “Hold the Door” Translate?

Spoiler alert!

If you’ve been following the Game of Thrones series on HBO, you’re probably aware of that heartbreaking last scene from the fifth episode of season six.

In their flight from the Night King’s attack on Blood Raven’s under-tree cave, Bran Stark and Meera Reed were able to escape through a tunnel and outside the freezing cold, but at the expense of one of the more memorable characters in the story’s universe, Hodor.

Meera asked Hodor to, well, hold the door to the cave’s secret exit — essentially sacrificing his own life, in order to keep wights from catching up. But at the same time, Bran was currently greenseeing into the past, and had warged into present-day Hodor through Hodor’s younger self, “Wyllis.”

Due to the complications of warging and greenseeing (the GoT-speak for taking another body’s consciousness and taking one’s consciousness into another time and place, respectively), Wyllis saw into his own death in the future, and the “hold the door” order stuck with him for the rest of his life, thus rendering him unable to say anything else but “hodor.”

What made this a poignant scene for most is that it is entirely new, even for those who have read the book. Given that The Winds of Winter seems to be in writing/editorial purgatory for the past couple of years, the HBO production’s sixth season is also entirely new territory for book fans alike.

Does it Translate?

Days after watching that episode, my thought about the “hold the door scene” has turned toward translatability. I’m aware that HBO dubs Game of Thrones and other shows into different languages, in territories where dual-language is supported. Thus, I agree with Jack Crosbie’s thoughts on Inverse that portmanteaus can be confusing and ineffective when translated to other languages. If Meera’s final words to Hodor were, for example, “tenir la porte” (Portugese), “halten sie die tür auf” (German), or “daravaaja pakado” (Hindi), it might not make as much of a eureka moment for viewers as “hold the door!”

Other instances of cultural and linguistic differences come to mind. In the mid-2000s, Malaysian animated series Upin & Ipin showed across Disney Channel Asia. In a classroom scene in one of the episodes, one of the characters gave “ice cream” as an example of a word that started with the letter A.

This would be very confusing for audiences in most other English-speaking countries, if you’re not aware that the dessert is written as “aiskrim” in Bahasa Malaysia. Still, this loss-in-translation stuck into my mind as a potential educational faux pas if the series were intened to be showed to children still developing their language skills.

Nuances, Context and Meaning

Any content producer or developer — heck, even translators — should therefore be mindful of how much of the message can get lost when you translate content into another language, or even when you transplant a certain context into a different culture altogether.

Every language and culture has its own nuance, and we run the risk of losing meaning and intent just because of bad — or worse, forced — translations. “Although speaking feels as natural as breathing, the truth is that the words we use are strange, abstract symbols, at least as remote from their objects as Egyptian hieroglyphs are from theirs, and as quietly treacherous as Egyptian tombs,” writes Adam Gopnik on the New Yorker, about losing meaning in translation.

The point here is that we can’t always reduce thought and meaning into simple words, especially if there is a deeper context behind these. However, when it comes to far-reaching cultural/media phenomenon like Game of Thrones, where characters’ names or utterances are significantly linked to the narrative, then it’s the word that gives meaning.

In the end, I think that the utterance “hold the door” will probably have a big impact beyond literature, entertainment and popular culture, given the hit that GoT is.