Unlike Present-day English, Old English syntax is much freer than our current subject-verb-object format. While in PDE a sentence such as the wise king told seven secrets to his frightened daughter would be produced as such, this SVO word order is not always the case in OE. The translated se snotora cyning tealde seofon diernu tō his āclan dehter could also be se snotora cyning tealde tō his āclan dehter seofon diernu, or se snotora cyning seofon diernu tō his āclan dehter tealde as meaning in OE is dependent on inflections, rather than word order. While in PDE we understand the wise king to be the subject of the sentence because it comes before the verb, it’s marked as the subject in OE by any inflections that the noun takes.
When we want to translate a sentence from PDE to OE, we first have to identify the word class of each element of the sentence – is it a noun? A verb? Etc. Then, using all the information we have previously discussed about case, count, tense, etc, we can produce and accurate translation.