Translation Team: Please stop doing this...

[TouchandFeel]

That's not technically old english. Real old english is on a much higher level of confusing than how the NPCs talk.

Google the intro to the Canterbury Tales, that's a great example of it.

The Canterbury Tales are Middle English, not Old English.

Old English was the language of the Angles and Saxons, as well as some of the other Germanic tribes that spread into and took over much of Western Europe, settling mainly in what is now England.
Angles/Anglo-Saxon -> Angoland -> England -> English.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English


An example of Old English in literature is the non-translated version of Beowulf.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales came much later after the language had altered due to the melding with the languages of other prominent tribes that had settled in Western Europe, primarily the Normans due to their conquest/occupation of England.
At this point the language had evolved into Middle English.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English

Shakespeare, while antiquated, is still just an earlier form of Modern English, often referred to as Early Modern English.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Modern_English

So, again Shakespeare is not Old English although it is old.
Canterbury Tales is Middle English, not Old English.
Beowulf is Old English.

Also somebody already posted the beginning to the Canterbury Tales in this thread on pg.11 and on pg.14 is my quick and dirty translation.

Whan that aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
Tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(so priketh hem nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of engelond to caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

Yep, its pretty much the setup for all the other tales to be told as The Canterbury Tales are a collection of tales told to the narrator by people that he meets on the road.

Pretty much it says that during Spring, when the April showers begin and the world turns green and the flowers begin to bloom, people across the land go on a pilgrimage to Canterbury.