Let me tell you about this Game of Thrones Language Translator thing
I ran into this about three years ago when I was deep in a Dothraki rabbit hole. There are actually several fan-built tools online that let you type English phrases and get back rough approximations in High Valyrian or Dothraki. The most common ones are web-based translators, not apps you download. You just paste text into a form field, hit a button, and get something back that is usually 40 to 60 percent accurate depending on how complex your sentence is. Here is the practical reality. George R.R. Martin and David J. Peterson created a real conlang system with grammar rules, but it was never designed to handle arbitrary modern English input the way a Google Translate engine handles French or Japanese. These fan tools are built on vocab lists and basic phrase maps, not neural translation networks. That means they work okay for short, simple sentences and fall apart fast when you try to translate anything with subordinate clauses or idiomatic expressions. The way these tools typically work is through a word-for-word substitution engine. You type "Hello, my name is Jon" into the input box and it replaces each English word with the closest Dothraki or Valyrian equivalent from its dictionary, then arranges them according to whatever simplified grammar rules the builder coded in. Sometimes word order gets messed up because the actual languages use object-verb-subject structure while the tool just does a linear swap. You end up with something that looks like the target language but reads completely wrong to anyone who actually studies it.
I personally spent about two hours testing one of these against phrases I knew the correct translations for. For basic greetings and simple noun phrases, the accuracy was decent. Maybe 70 percent. Once I started throwing in compound sentences, the output became nonsense. One translator gave me something like "fire kill my brother dead" when I asked for "my brother died in the fire." It swapped the words correctly but completely ignored the grammar layer. The tool was not aware of verb conjugation, past tense markers, or case endings at all. If you want to actually use this for anything meaningful, here is what I ended up doing instead of relying on the automatic translator. I would type my sentence into the tool, get the rough output, and then cross-reference every single word against the actual Dothraki dictionary from the Language Factory or the High Valyrian glossary that David Peterson himself approved. This takes maybe 10 to 15 minutes per sentence, which is way slower than clicking a button, but the result is something that would not make a native conlang speaker cringe immediately. The biggest problem nobody talks about is that these tools have incomplete dictionaries. Dothraki has roughly 3,000 documented words. High Valyrian has maybe 1,500 to 2,000. That is it. If your sentence contains a word that is not in the database, the translator either drops it entirely, replaces it with a guessed synonym, or just spits out the English word unchanged. I ran into this constantly when trying to translate anything about modern technology or abstract concepts. There is no word for "computer" in Dothraki because the Dothraki do not have computers in Westeros. So the tool just gives you nothing back for that part of the sentence and you are left guessing what it was supposed to say.
There is also the issue of dialect variation. High Valyrian in the show is mostly based on one standardized version, but in the lore there are multiple descendant languages and regional dialects. The translator tools almost never account for this. They give you one answer and present it as if it is the only correct one. If you are just playing around with friends, this does not matter. If you are writing a story or something where consistency matters, you need to know which version of the language the tool is pulling from, and most of them do not tell you. My recommendation if you actually care about accuracy is to skip the automatic translator entirely and just use the published vocabulary lists with a manual lookup approach. It is slower, yes, but you actually learn the language while you do it. The fan tools are fine for novelty. They are fine for making a funny username or translating a single short phrase for a party trick. They are not fine for serious study or for producing text that anyone who has read the books would accept as legitimate. One more thing. A lot of these translator sites are hosted on personal domains with no update history. Some have not been touched since 2019. The dictionaries may be stale, and some of them include mistranslations that got copied from earlier versions and never corrected. I found one site that had the Dothraki word for "horse" listed as "rhhar" for no explainable reason. It was just wrong and had been wrong since the original publish date. I reported it to the site owner through the contact form and never got a reply. So treat any output from these tools as a starting point, not a final answer.
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