English to Old Norse translator

freeno signupevery rule published

Google Translate does not offer Old Norse. This translator asks Google for Icelandic, the closest language it does offer, and then rewrites that into Old Norse with a documented set of rules: word swaps, sound changes and grammar. It is a rule-based rewrite, not a human translation, so check anything that matters with a speaker.

0 / 240

40.0 on 163 real sentences; Google's Icelandic as is: 36.5.

The score is chrF: how closely the output matches what real Old Norse speakers wrote, character by character, from 0 to 100. Tested on 163 Old Norse sentences from Wiktionary with their English, held out and never read: the English goes through the course's own route (Google into Icelandic, then the mod) and is scored against the real sentence; no second translation exists to give a human ceiling.

40.0score on 163 real sentences
36.5Google's Icelandic as is
243word swaps
12grammar and sound rules

How the rewrite works

Modern Icelandic rewritten into Old Norse by rules: the classical forms of the common words (ok, at, þat, svá, váru, hon, mjök, mik), the -r of maðr and kemr where Icelandic added a u, the -t of mikit and kallat, -lig- for -leg-, and vér and þér for the modern plurals. The words are learned from saga editions printed in both spellings. No output is written by an LLM.

The rules are a plain file anyone can read, test and copy. Every translation shows Google's Icelandic underneath, so you can see exactly what the rules changed.

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