Hatari Translations

I am a native Icelander who loves Hatari. I will transcribe and translate Hatari lyrics/interviews/other material on request (and sometimes even non-Hatari stuff), and have already posted translated lyrics for every Hatari song! Check out the blog index here, my translation policy here, and feel free to drop requests in my askbox.

[hatari-translations]

Hæ! Ég var að sjá "Cyber - Finnðig" á síðunni þinni. Ég er Ljósvaki sem sagt, sem pródúseraði lagið og tók upp ásamt því að vera með eitt vers í laginu. Fyrsta versið er TY svo er ég með síðasta. Ef þú hefur áhuga þá er það: "Svikamylla,
sit að tjilla,
svitapilla, roach killa
kunnugt stef,
Renn á lyktina
Stend pliktina
Næturvakt, loftið rakt,
ertu ekki að finn'etta?
Spinn'etta
Kóngulóarvef
Götuvit, tek alltaf meira en ég gef
Dreymi hjartadrottningar er ég sef,
grafir gref, brenni brýr
Ástarbréf"

Hæ! Takk kærlega fyrir leiðréttinguna og afsakið sein viðbrögð - ég er nú búin að uppfæra textann.

---

The asker is Ljósvaki, who generously provided the correct lyrics for the half-transcribed verse in "Finnðig" as well as clarifying who was who!

Apologies for the relative silence on this blog lately - I had a child in September, on top of the million things I'm juggling normally. Still alive, though!

[hatari-translations]

hello hello! i just watched the new mv for hatari's latest song, and i am so curious about the newspaper prop. it looks like an ad for the ps5, which seems kind of random? 👀

I was just going to post about this!

The front page there says

PlayStation á jólatilboði til 17. des

or

PlayStation on Christmas offer until December 17th

Meanwhile, the back page says

Svartur fössari Stærsta tilboðsvika ársins! Ný tilboð á hverjum virkum degi. Skoðaðu öll tilboðin á elko.is

or

Black Friday The biggest offer week of the year! New offers every weekday. Check out all offers at elko.is

In other words, it looks like simply a genuine Icelandic newspaper that they grabbed to use as a prop for the music video, with the outside happening to be a full spread ad from electronics store ELKO. I found the utterly mundane Icelandicness of it pretty humorous in the context of the music video for a song in English.

[hatari-translations]

Are there any Icelandic names that aren’t permitted by the naming committee if vowels lack accents? That’s probably really badly worded, so I guess what I mean is I remember a while ago you said on a post that Magnús without the ú (so Magnus) isn’t an approved name. Are there any other fairly common names like that (where you replace either a vowel with an accent with a vowel that doesn’t have one, like Magnús -> Magnus, or a consonant with another one) that have been rejected?

And this might seem like a random question to tack onto the end of this, but does the naming committee have a name? I assume it does, I was just curious 🙂

One of the committee's rules is to reject names that are not written according to standard Icelandic orthography, unless that way of writing them is found to be traditionally established in Iceland, defined in terms of so-and-so many Icelandic citizens of at least a certain age having that name. In practice, an awful lot of name variations do count as having an established tradition in Iceland by this standard - looking through their recent verdicts, for instance, they approved Josephine even though that's a thoroughly un-Icelandic spelling (the standard Icelandic spelling of that name would be Jósefína). But meanwhile, Josef (as opposed to the standard Jósef) was rejected, simply because it turns out there have only been four Icelandic Josefs and the oldest of them was born in 1986, which does not make it traditionally established enough to be permitted. It does feel a bit arbitrary at times.

The naming committee is called Mannanafnanefnd, which literally just means "people names committee".

[antialiasis]

Badly machine-translated Icelandic AO3 ship slop, part II

Now I'm looking at some of the still-up 'fics' in Icelandic on AO3 and giggling at the bad machine translations.

This line is obviously a translation of "Suguru?" she breathed as she opened the door. But andaðist in Icelandic is decidedly not a speech verb. Andaði means breathed (but is not ever used as a speech verb); andaðist, with the middle voice -st ending, means to pass away. Unfortunately, this woman died the moment she opened the door. Tragic.

Originally, clearly "It's just a scratch," he said, though the pain in his voice betrayed him. Klóra means scratch as a verb - but as a noun, it means something more like a back scratcher or a scratching post for cats.

Obviously meant to be Shoko stared at him. "Sit. Don't argue." She's telling him to sit down and not argue with her. But the actual word for telling someone to sit is Sestu, the singular imperative of setjast. Setjið is the plural imperative of the verb setja (to put), so it's instead telling multiple people to... put, with no object. Also, "Ekki rífast" means don't argue as in don't have an argument with somebody, something you might say to your two children who are fighting with each other, not don't argue with what I'm saying.

Definitely meant to be "Not a fan of surprises?" but it actually means "Not a fan who is surprising?"

Clearly originally something like, "Is that an order, doctor?" but unfortunately "pöntun" is the Icelandic word for an order as in the pizza you ordered, not an order as in a command.

Please, my language does not deserve this.

[olderthannetfic]

welp! I can’t believe it happened, but apparently, ao3 did a mass deletion of a ship tag. Idk if it’s the supposed 1 person, but seeing how the community is reacting, it’s looking like more than 1 author got their fics deleted with no warning. I’m so disappointed it happened in ao3 and I’m just waiting for response about it because the jump of fic numbers was too extreme to not be noticed. 8k to 5k man. Ship war might be a reason for it, but again, I’m just waiting to see if my support ticket gets response. Also has this happened before? Like on ao3 in particular?

--

What ship tag?

AO3 periodically puts its foot down with serial offenders who refuse to stop using AO3 to funnel people to their kofis, and non-fanwork spam gets deleted. It's unlikely that they just deleted a bunch of fanworks for no reason though.

ETA: Oh for fuck sake. Is this fucking Genshin wank?

Stop spamming the archive just so your shitty ship can "win" some war.

And/or stop believing the people who cry that PAC came after them ~out of nowhere~ when they know perfectly well what they did.

Because people still think that worthless methodology on the Top 100 Ships means something, some fuckface posted three thousand spam works just to force their ship on there. No, not the AI fics of the show for toddlers. Machine translated repeat upload drabbles for one of the ten kajillion Genshin ships. Then they orphaned half of them or made them anon or something to try to pretend that the lurkers support them in e-mail other authors posted this flood too.

Now that AO3 has gotten around to deleting their spam, they're apparently wailing about it somewhere on social media and trying to paint AO3 as censors. This is resulting in a flood of lackeys whining to AO3 about how Concerned™ they are.

You're a sucker, anon.

Either that, or you're trying to use my tumblr to spread panic.

You can tell AO3 doesn't actually believe in deletions because Genshin Impact fandom hasn't been booted off the archive for being fucking annoying.

[butlerian-judith]

anon. anon look me in the eyes and tell me you don't think deleting 3k works in this dupespam, minimally edited style is warranted. look me in the fucking eyes and say it.

[olderthannetfic]

It's annoying enough to be spamming at all, but cluttering up the search results for minority languages is especially offensive to me.

[heljar-heimur]

Seconding @out-of-mana

This even reads like AI slop that was then translated by AI into Icelandic.

"Þeir eru í opinberu samhengi" took me out - opinbert samband could be used for being an official couple but samhengi means context.

"Hanskahöndina" is a new word, direct translation of gloved hand ... Does not make sense in Icelandic.

"Hann saknar ekki þess" ... Probably meant they didn't miss as in they noticed.... but it's missing as in missing someone and it doesn't make sense 😂😂😂

[heljar-heimur]

After replying to another post by @olderthannetfic with a bit about not reading in Icelandic because atleast on fanfiction . net it used to be just juvenelia and babies first stories in the HP or Sims fandom.... and such I decided to check out Icelandic works on Ao3.... Apparently Jujutsu Kaisen fandom is doing the exact same thing.

Do I report these? like they're all anon and they're all just short ficlets in BAD Iceandic.

[antialiasis]

Oh my god? I was not expecting the latest AO3 drama to involve spam fics in badly machine-translated Icelandic. My language, in the wild! Somebody noticed us! By which I mean, please stop noticing us and go away.

(I think the “í opinberu samhengi” may be a poor translation of “in public”? Still nonsense, the proper Icelandic translation of “in public” would be “á almannafæri”, but I can see how the machine translation would come up with that)

[hatari-translations]

heyyy! Very basic question, but I've been wondering what is the weather like in Iceland during the seasons?? I hear that it's practically always cold and that the summer is very mild and it rarely gets too hot. How extreme can the cold get during the deep winter?

Iceland has an island climate; the ocean tempers it, making seasonal differences a lot milder than in more inland areas. The Gulf stream in particular also makes it considerably warmer than it would otherwise be for its latitude. The average temperature in Reykjavík is around 10°C in July but around 0°C in January; it only rarely gets colder than maybe -15°C or hotter than 20°C.

[hatari-translations]

What is Icelandic cuisine like? Are there any things you know are eaten in most Western countries, but not so much in Iceland? What are some things that most of you eat that might seem strange to foreigners?

I know horse meat is less taboo here than some other places; we love our horses, but it's by no means unthinkable to eat them. Whale meat is likewise controversial (there are a lot of Icelanders who are against whaling, and the number is growing) but it is still served at restaurants and in stores.

I don't quite know about things that are eaten commonly elsewhere but not here. Generally the classic staple Icelandic cuisine is a bit of a fusion of European influence (especially Nordic and in particular Danish), some American influence, and some more particularly Icelandic food, which generally involves fish and/or lamb and, when you get to the properly hardcore traditional Icelandic food, various insane and/or unpleasant ways to use every part of every available animal and preserve it as long as possible. This last category includes cured shark (hákarl), pickled ram testicles, whole sheep heads with eyes and all, and so on, and tends to be eaten mostly in the þorri month of the old Icelandic calendar (January/February), when we will throw feasts with large buffets of it; it's not food people enjoy day to day so much as food people will make a bit of a thing of eating once a year while reveling a bit in how gross it is. Like, Icelanders love to make tourists eat shark just to see them react (I think there's a video of Gordon Ramsay calling it the worst thing he's ever tasted). I have never eaten shark myself and don't plan to.

Icelanders are also super into chocolate-covered licorice; half of Icelandic candy is some flavor of this, while I gather it's not too much of a thing anywhere else even in licorice-appreciating countries like the other Nordics.

[hatari-translations]

Hello, I've noticed Icelanders often type "man" instead of "maður". Is this because they pronounce it that way or is there something else going on? Thank you and I hope you have a lovely summer :)

This is a pretty new effort by some to push a conscious linguistic shift.

The use of "man" instead of "maður" is specifically in the context of "maður" being used as an indefinite pronoun, similar to the pronoun "one" in an English sentence like, "One does not simply walk into Mordor." In English the use of "one" in this way is somewhat formal/old-fashioned, and the more common casual, modern way to phrase the same kind of statement would probably use the pronoun "you" instead, but in Icelandic, the indefinite "maður" is very common and casual.

Now, "maður" the indefinite pronoun happens to look like "maður" the noun, which means a man (but can also mean "husband" or just "human", depending on context). In recent years there's been some pushback against the notion of gender bias in the language; there's been an effort to replace words denoting nationality and profession that end in -maður, for example, which historically have been used generically especially in the plural to refer to all people of that nationality/profession, by ones that end in -fólk (people) or such. Some of this pushback has also landed on maður the indefinite pronoun. It's always been used by both men and women and referred generically to any person, but some people argue that using that word generically for people of any gender is a sexist bias in the language. Thus, some women began to instead use the neuter word "man", which is an old-fashioned word that means a woman (yes, "man" means woman in Icelandic) as an indefinite pronoun instead of "maður", presumably picking it over "kona" (the usual modern word for a woman) because it sounds more similar to "maður", making for a smoother replacement.

Personally I'm not a huge fan; I actually think it would be a negative for the gendering of the Icelandic language if speakers do come to think of the word "maður" as referring exclusively to men even in a context in which it had thoroughly established itself as completely generic and non-gendered, and gendering the indefinite pronoun like that suddenly weirdly implies that when making a generic reference you're only referring to people of your own gender, which is just plain less useful than the fully generic version (also, if it catches on it forces people to gender themselves in situations they otherwise wouldn't have, and there's not really an equally smooth enby version to my knowledge). So all in all I, a woman, still use maður as an indefinite pronoun and have no plans to switch to man, and secretly hope it does not catch on any more than it already has. But nobody controls linguistic evolution, and I know and respect people who do use man.

[hatari-translations]

oh I would absolutely love if you kept transcribing the English songs! my mother tongue isn't English (and tbh even in my mother tongue I can't fully understand song lyrics), so I'd say about 30-40% of their new songs is incomprehensible to me, and honestly you're such a cornerstone in the fandom. such an essential service you provide. I think no one else does transcriptions, because I've tried to look up the lyrics and nothing

That's very good to know, thank you. I've got a lot of stuff on my plate so the translation/transcription queue on here has been languishing a bit, but it's always good to hear people appreciate what I do and that it would be useful, and I'll be sure to get to that when I can.

[hatari-translations]

Hi! What are some phrases used by Icelandic people? Something sort of like "it's raining cats and dogs". Takk for the help!

I once wrote up some fun Icelandic idioms that make no sense directly translated on my main blog here!

[hatari-translations]

Hey have you heard the new songs performed by Hatari at their recent shows? I honestly quite like them and am super excited to hear the studio versions. What's your opinion?

I enjoy what I've heard, but I don't think I've heard all of them yet! Very pleased to see them working on new music.

[hatari-translations]

What are some examples of Icelandic family names? Also, what are names that give off dark, ominous or eerie vibes (that could suit a sort of villainous character)? Thanks in advance!

The Icelandic Wikipedia lists some of the most common family names in Iceland today, though several of them are likely common mostly because they're very common names in countries that have a lot of recent immigrants, like Nguyen or Rodriguez.

It also includes the origins of various family names that have stronger roots in Iceland. Some of them are just foreign family names from immigrants from further in the past, like Beck, Claessen or Diego. But there are also two big classes of family names that properly originate in Iceland:

The first is names ultimately based on locations, such as Blöndal (from Blöndudalur) or Laxness (from Laxnes). Like in many countries, people would take up the name of the place where they lived or something derived from it. Usually they will corrupt it a bit; Laxness uses the genitive, names derived from a dalur will generally shorten the first part and then end in -dal, etc.

The second is family names based on patronyms. These just derive from someone with a patronym deciding to use it or a corruption of it as a family name instead of a patronym, because at the time patronyms were seen as lower-class and family names as fancy and sophisticated. These often end in -sen rather than -son and eschew Icelandic letters, in what was probably an active effort to sound more Danish (because Iceland was under Danish rule at the time, the ruling class was all Danes, upper-class Icelandic was peppered with Danish, and Icelanders who wanted to educate themselves would go to university in Denmark where they would want to fit in and have a name their peers could pronounce). These include Stephensen (from Stefánsson), Thoroddsen (from Þóroddsson), Thorlacius (from Þorláksson), Guðjohnsen (from Guðjónsson), and so on.

The vibes of a name are of course subjective, but as a kid I always found Illugi a pretty ominous name, since "illur" means evil, and it kind of sounds like "ill-hugi" or "evil mind"; I remember a kid at my preschool with that name that I was vaguely afraid of. It's just a regular name that anyone could have, of course!

And you might of course find a person with a name like Úlfur (wolf) ominous, if you consider a wolf a scary animal. "Ljótur" is a name that probably originally meant light, in reference to blond hair, but today it's the word for ugly, which makes it a bit of an unfortunate name; it's also a common name suffix, so you've for example got names like Úlfljótur (which today reads as wolf-ugly).

[hatari-translations]

This cant be true 😭

It does make grammatical sense, the same way that "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" makes grammatical sense in English - if you'd never heard it before you'd need a moment to parse what exactly is going on there, but it tracks once you understand what part of speech each á is. (Grammatically, anyway. A sheep on a river owning a sheep on another farm doesn't make a lot of sense.)

(If you haven't heard the buffalo sentence before: "Buffalo buffalo" can mean buffalo (the animal) from the city of Buffalo, New York, same way as, say, "California Democrats". "Buffalo" can also be a verb meaning to bully. The sentence should be parsed as "Buffalo [from] Buffalo [that] buffalo [from] Buffalo bully [also themselves] bully buffalo [from] Buffalo.")

The breakdown of the á sentence is:

The first word is according to the given translation the noun á meaning a sheep. Technically, in the nominative case (as the subject of a sentence) that noun is supposed to be ær (it's ær - á - á - ær), so to be strictly grammatically correct, the sentence with that meaning ought to be Ær á á á á á Á. But a lot of natives do in fact say á in the nominative because the declension of this word is counterintuitive, so it's not nonsense to say it's the noun meaning sheep, just strictly speaking incorrect.

The second word is the preposition á, meaning "on" or "onto" (here, contextually, it's "on").

The third word is á the noun meaning a river. That one is declined á - á - á - ár. So technically the first word, the nominative á, should mean a river and not a sheep; I expect the main reason it isn't translated that way is that it makes less semantic sense to talk about a river owning something. The third word could be either the sheep á or the river á, since what comes after the preposition á meaning on should be in the dative case, which is á for both nouns.

The fourth word is á the first- and third-person present tense form of the verb eiga (to own).

The fifth word is the object of the verb eiga, which should be in the accusative case. Again, both the sheep and river noun are á in the accusative case, so it could be either.

The sixth word is the preposition again.

The seventh word is just the noun meaning river again, except now it's capitalized as the name of a farm.

[hatari-translations]

Hallo I've got a question! How do they go about teaching English in Iceland? Most Icelandic people from what I've heard are pretty much fluent English speakers so it's gotta be taught pretty well. I live in Ireland, and they also teach a second language here, Irish. However even after about 13 years of being taught Irish, most people don't know how to speak it properly because the way it's taught to us is not so great. I was just wondering how it's done in Iceland!! Takkkkkk!

The key to how fluent Icelanders are in English is not that our English education at school is super good, but rather that we're pretty constantly immersed in English outside of school. Most songs people listen to or hear on the radio are in English; most movies and TV shows people watch are in English with Icelandic subtitles (movies and shows for kids, with a substantial target audience who can't read subtitles yet, get dubbed but that's about it); all video games that aren't specifically educational games for preschoolers are in English (and never have so much as captions in Icelandic). If you want to look something up on the internet that isn't specifically Icelandic, you'll probably be doing that in English too, because 400,000 people just don't produce enough websites to have all the information you might be looking for. People watch YouTube videos; those are overwhelmingly in English. People follow interesting people on social media, and most of them are posting in English. If you're hearing buzz online about some interesting book that isn't specifically Icelandic, it probably hasn't been translated into Icelandic, or at least not yet, so off to the English-language section of the bookstore you go!

So, for instance, as a kid I did get English classes at school, but I would say I got fluent in English mostly via a progression of

vague background absorption of words/phrases from omnipresent product packaging, slogans, titles, catchphrases from movies, etc.

playing Pokémon, in English (there was a Swedish instruction booklet, which was not actually all that helpful because Icelandic kids can absolutely not read Swedish, but the game itself was in English)

watching my brother play games like Monkey Island and WarCraft II, in English

slowly making my way through the fourth Harry Potter book, which was out in English but hadn't been translated yet after I finished the third book, armed with a gigantic dictionary

browsing the internet for websites about stuff I was interested in, like Pokémon and Harry Potter

starting to read and post on English-language internet forums about stuff I was interested in, making my own English-language website, and writing stories in English and posting them online where I would get critique and corrections from native English-speakers

making a bunch of foreign internet friends whom I would talk to in English

getting into more niche movies/TV shows that wouldn't have Icelandic subtitles

reading increasingly complex books, blogs, etc. in English

etc.

So the reason Irish classes aren't achieving the same results in Ireland is almost certainly mainly that you probably don't have any of that immersion in the language. You don't have Irish-language media everywhere that you need to learn Irish to enjoy, friends you can only speak to in Irish, most websites being in Irish. Unfortunately, there's no easy way to just make that happen for a language that is small and obscure, especially when your first language is English, which is so overwhelmingly dominant in the media sphere; there's going to be hardly anything you could enjoy in Irish but not in English.

For comparison, Icelanders also learn Danish at school, but we don't have that kind of immersion in Danish, and we're overwhelmingly not very good at that either; the main exception is people who have actually gone and lived in Denmark/Norway/Sweden for a couple of years (which a fair amount of people do, mind). If I meet a Dane I might attempt to speak a little bit of Danish if I only need to say simple sentences, but anything more complex than that and I will switch to English and we will probably both breathe a sigh of relief (the other Nordic countries also tend to be pretty fluent in English, for similar reasons).

[hatari-translations]

Halloo quick question, does a "sh" sound exist in Icelandic at all?

Not really! We approximate it with a sj if writing it out phonetically, but that's more of an s followed by a j sound.

[hatari-translations]

hi! hope you're well! so I have spent some time pondering the new hatari era and particularly the very unpopular Breadcrumbs, and I was wondering: is there an icelandic song that has the same vibe as Breadcrumbs? like say, Klámstrákur? or Ógleði? i personally found Breadcrumbs to have very uncomfortable lyrics, to me it's almost grotesque, definitely very crude, exaggerated, not necessarily in a bad way (it grew on me, despite how controversial it was when they dropped it), I'm aware it's probably the very point of the song. do any of the icelandic songs sound like that to the native speakers? because on the translations they don't so much, but I know some things are untranslatable.

In general, I wouldn't say any of the Icelandic Hatari lyrics have the same vibes as "Breadcrumbs", so to speak, no. Matthías's Icelandic lyrics tended to be written in a very articulate and formal sort of register, where "Breadcrumbs" is as best I can tell leaning into sounding sleazy and addressing "you" in a crude, lustful kind of way which isn't something they've really gone for before - the closest is the second verse of "Þræll", but the vibe of it is pretty different.

Maybe I should try to transcribe "Breadcrumbs" and "Quantity Control" and do some commentary even though they are in English, just for completeness/rambling.

[hatari-translations]

HATARI RELEASED A NEW SONG!! What do you think of it? I think it just came out 4 hours ago damn 😭

I like it! Feels pretty old-school Hatari but in English - the whole "I am the..." refrain evokes the Spillingardans speech. Glad to see them releasing new music more regularly again, too!