English to Dothraki Translator: The Honest 2026 Guide

English to Dothraki Translator: The Honest Guide

If you typed "English to Dothraki translator" into Google, you probably found a dozen websites promising instant translation. Most of them are broken, half of them return nonsense, and exactly zero of them work the way Google Translate works for French.

This is an honest guide to what tools actually exist for translating into Dothraki in 2026, why machine translation fails for this language, and which option you should reach for depending on what you need to translate.

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Why English to Dothraki Is Hard

Three reasons machine translation does not work for Dothraki.

1. The corpus is too small. Dothraki has roughly 3,000 documented words and a few thousand documented sentences — mostly written by David J. Peterson himself for the show. Google Translate's French model was trained on hundreds of millions of sentence pairs. Neural translation needs that volume.

2. The grammar is non-trivial. Dothraki has animate and inanimate noun classes, five grammatical cases, vowel harmony, and a particle-rich verb system. A surface-level word swap from English produces nonsense.

3. The vocabulary has gaps. Peterson built Dothraki for a culture of nomadic horse riders. There are dozens of words for horses, riding, grass, weather. There are very few words for technology, modern food, office work. Many English concepts simply have no Dothraki equivalent and must be paraphrased.

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The Tools That Actually Work

1. The Dothraki Wiki Dictionary (Free)

URL: dothraki.fandom.com What it does: Word-by-word lookup with about 3,000 entries. Cross-referenced to canon sources (show episodes, Peterson's blog, the Living Language book).

Strengths:

• Free and comprehensive
• Cites the canon source for each word
• Includes grammatical metadata (animate/inanimate, verb class)

Weaknesses:

• Word lookup only — no sentence translation
• You need to know Dothraki grammar to assemble words correctly
• Some entries are extrapolated by community contributors and labelled as such

Best for: Looking up specific words you already know exist in canon.

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2. Living Language Dothraki by David J. Peterson (Paid)

Format: Book + audio + app Price: ~$20 for the book; companion app pricing varies.

What it is: The official guide written by the language's creator. The book covers grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, and dialogue. The companion app includes audio of Peterson himself pronouncing every entry.

Strengths:

• Canonical — every word is verified by the creator
• Includes a full grammar reference, not just a dictionary
• Audio recordings remove pronunciation guesswork

Weaknesses:

• Not a translator — you still have to build sentences yourself
• The book is from 2014; some Season 6+ vocabulary is not included
• No interactive component

Best for: Anyone serious about learning Dothraki rather than just translating one phrase.

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3. Tengwar's Mithrandir AI Tutor (Free Tier Available)

URL: learningelvish.com What it does: An AI tutor that knows Peterson's documented grammar and vocabulary, and composes new sentences inside that constraint.

Strengths:

• Sentence-level translation, not just words
• Explains the grammar behind each translation
• Flags when a concept has no direct Dothraki equivalent (rather than inventing one)
• Free tier covers 5 chat sessions

Weaknesses:

• Limited by what is documented in canon — will refuse to invent novel vocabulary, which means some modern English concepts return paraphrases rather than direct translations
• Free tier caps at 5 chats; full access requires Premium ($9.99/month)

Best for: Translating a sentence or a paragraph into Dothraki with grammatical explanation.

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4. Google Translate (Does Not Support Dothraki)

Google Translate does not list Dothraki as a supported language. As of 2026, none of the major commercial translation services — DeepL, Microsoft Translator, Amazon Translate — support Dothraki either. There is no signal that this will change; the corpus is simply too small.

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5. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini (Unreliable)

Generic LLMs will produce something that looks like Dothraki when asked. The output is often wrong.

We tested all three on the sentence "The horse drinks water" in 2026:

Model	Output	Correct?
ChatGPT-5	Hrazef indelat eshna	Partially — indelat is infinitive, should be indela; eshna is "water" (canon)
Claude Opus 4.7	Hrazef indela eshna	Correct
Gemini 2.5	Hrazef ivelay aqua	Wrong — invented "ivelay" and used Latin "aqua"

The hallucination problem is real. Mithrandir on Tengwar avoids it by being explicitly constrained to Peterson's documented vocabulary and refusing to make up words.

For a deeper test of ChatGPT specifically, see our ChatGPT Dothraki translation test.

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What to Use When

Goal	Best Tool
Look up one word	Dothraki Wiki
Translate a phrase for a tattoo	Living Language Dothraki + double-check with Mithrandir
Write a paragraph of Dothraki	Tengwar's Mithrandir
Learn to translate yourself	Tengwar's structured Dothraki course
Translate "your name" into Dothraki	The phonology adaptation rules (see our names guide)

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What Cannot Be Translated

Some English concepts genuinely have no Dothraki equivalent. The Dothraki worldview was built by Peterson around a nomadic, pre-literate, horse-centric culture. Concepts that fail or require heavy paraphrase:

• Computer, internet, phone — no canon vocabulary; would have to be paraphrased as something like "thinking-stone" or "speaking-at-distance-stone"
• Office, meeting, email — none of these exist as nouns in canonical Dothraki
• Forgive — canonical Dothraki does not have a direct equivalent. Forgiveness is not a virtue in their culture; paraphrases involve "letting live" (vazhat thirat)
• Polite, shy, awkward — emotional vocabulary skews toward strength/weakness, honour/dishonour, rather than social comfort
• Marriage as a contract — Dothraki marriage is a relationship the khalasar witnesses, not a document anyone signs

Mithrandir will flag these gaps rather than invent words. ChatGPT will invent words.

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A Worked Example

Let us translate "I love you, moon of my life, and I will ride with you forever."

Step 1: Look up each content word.

• love → zhilat (infinitive); zhilak (1st person singular)
• you → yer (nominative) → yera (accusative, here)
• moon → jalan
• of life → atthirari (genitive of atthirar)
• my → anni
• ride → dothralat (infinitive); dothrak (1st person singular, future-like)
• with you → yeroon (ablative)
• forever → ajjalan (extrapolated)

Step 2: Assemble with SVO grammar. Anha zhilak yera, jalan atthirari anni, majin anha dothrak yeroon ajjalan.

Step 3: Verify. The first half is direct canon (Daenerys says it to Drogo). The second half is grammatical but ajjalan for "forever" is extrapolated rather than directly attested.

This is the kind of work Mithrandir does in one prompt rather than ten dictionary lookups.

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Related Reading

• ChatGPT Dothraki Translation Tested
• Dothraki Vocabulary List: Words Every Beginner Needs
• Dothraki Grammar Guide

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Learn Dothraki with Tengwar

Tengwar offers free Dothraki lessons in a Duolingo-style format — the only mainstream platform teaching Dothraki, Elvish, and Klingon together. Start free →. For a full comparison of Dothraki learning resources, read the best app to learn Dothraki in 2026.