Assyrian, Babylonian, Sumerian Translator Created

DrJackson writes "A new online translator that can translate Assyrian, Babylonian, Sumerian and Egyptian hieroglyphics (1 of the 3 types anyway) has been developed. This is the first time I ever saw a translator for cuneiform. Something like this would be great for translating interesting historical records like the Amarna Letters."

Submission is completely bogus and hasn't read TFA

[sbjornda]

Read the article, then go to the web site. The web site translates FROM English TO the other languages. So there are no secrets revealed here. Unless you plan on revealing your personal secrets to someone from 3000 years ago by sending them through some sort of time machine.

-- .nosig

Not really, but....

[Joce640k]

Not really, but my gf's a language teacher and you wouldn't believe the amount of "homework" she gets which looks like a robot translated it from Hieroglyphics.

Some people just don't get it.

Test with simple phrases yield poor results

[Darth_Keryx]

I tried a few basic phrases where I know (from graduate school) what the Akkadian should be. "If a man kills..." (shumma awilum idak, if I recall) from Hammurapi's Code. "For the gods" (ana ilani). "An adoption tablet" (tuppi maruti, all over the place especially in Nuzi tablets). Only a few words were represented correctly, and surely through the simplistic "this English word matches" method. I was shocked that even "kills" and "gods" were not rendered correctly. The script on the site tells me that terribly outdated sources were used. Tried the same for a few very simple Egyptian phrases. "The city is in joy" (all over the place in Gardiner, 3rd ed) (result not too bad on this one). "The priest hears the god". What? No flag (n-ch-r, sign for deity)? Few years ago I researched how to write out "God is Love" and "God loves you" (for Vacation Bible School, the theme was archeology-past), and I scoured Gardiner to make sure I got the grammar just right. Oh heck not even close - only correct part was mr for love, but should be mrwt for the noun. Don't get me on the Sumerian tests. Really disgustingly simple stuff from temple dedicatory inscriptions (I had just one semester of Sumerian). Well... got dingir for "god" but that's about it. Sorry. 10/10 for good intentions... but minus several million for the results. Sorry. 10/10 for good intentions... but minus several million for the results.

Re:no unicode support?

[ianare]

Not yet, though they are on their way [unicode.org] to being in the standard. As far as sumerian cuneiform, they are already in utf-8 [wikipedia.org], part of the ancient languages section.
"One character encoding to rule them all." ;-)

Re:Uh...right.

[calebt3]

Agglutinative: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/agglutinati ve [reference.com]
Morphemes: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/morphemes [reference.com]

I think he is complaining that there are so many words that are actually complete sentences or parts of sentences.

Actually, that makes me wonder

[Moraelin]

Actually, that makes me wonder about an extra technical aspect. AFAIK, writing in Egypt wasn't left to right, same size. They sometimes wrote left to right (with the faces of the hieroglyphs pointing that way), sometimes right to left (ditto), sometimes vertically, and, here's the kicker, sometimes just turned it all into a sort of a painting. I.e., sometimes the symbols were rearranged, and some some made bigger, some smaller, to get an aesthetic picture.

So I'm really curious how they'd help a totally clueless guy like me input the last case.

Not saying it can't be done, so hold your horses with the "OMG be sure they already thought of everything" posts, folks. Just asking how. Would I be able to just run it through a scanner and upload the image? If I was smart and learned enough to figure it out on my own, which is kinda a pre-requisite to inputting it then with a keyboard, I wouldn't need an online translator.

Also, would they include a dictionary of the common phrases, metaphors, etc? Remember, I'm a guy who can't even read it (or I wouldn't need an online translator), so any cultural references would go even higher over my head.

E.g., AFAIK, 110 being a perfect number in their numerology, it also ended up the perfect lifespan of a human, so phrases like "he lived 110 years" were a metaphor for "he was a perfect guy" (or really really liked, at least) or "he lived a perfect life." You can find that kind of stuff about people who actually died in their 30's (which was actually the peak of the gauss curve for males in the Old Kingdom, so 110 would have been an _extreme_ improbability) or 40's.

E.g., some addressed letters "to your scribe" or complimented said scribe, which would seem a bit bizarre. That is, unless you figure out it was a fancy way of saying "I know you can read and write, and you're reading this yourself, as opposed to having a scribe read it to you", which, apparently, was something appreciated.

Re:I didn't think they'd cracked modern languages.

[quintesse]

You were right in expecting gibberish, just read here for example: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archive s/004867.html [upenn.edu]