Lost in Translation

In my previous post about the midterm assignment, I talked about the difficulties my group and I faced in trying to create our artifact. Now, I would like to discuss the difficulties we faced in trying to translate another group's artifact. Our assigned group was the Africa group, otherwise known as the Egypt group, otherwise known as the group with the language that seems impossibly difficult to interpret. In a word, trying to figure out the Egyptian was hard. In many words it was infuriatingly difficult.

Within our group, each of us was assigned different tasks. My assigned task was to figure out how to translate the message from English to Arabic once we had translated the Egyptian to English. Unfortunately our group couldn't really make it even that far. Whether or not there is a specialist in Egyptian at BYU or not we either chose not to meet with that person or could not meet with them for whatever reason. In any case, we found ourselves in the library pouring over books about the Egyptian language for hours trying to find some sort of meaning in the assigned artifact. Here's the difficulty we discovered: there's too many meanings to each symbol!

In Egyptian, there are a multitude of different symbols, all of which can stand for individual letters or even complete words. Additionally different arrangements of different symbols can completely change the individual meaning of each symbol. In the assortment of different books we used (there were about six) we found some of the symbols used by the Egypt group, but a large majority of their symbols were no where to be found.

Eventually, we created a sentence that may or may not have had the intended meaning of the Egypt group's original message. From the group, we found out that each symbol was suppose to be a word in itself. So we wrote down a line of blanks (one for each word in the sentence) and started filling in each blank with the different meanings of each symbol that we could identify. From there we had to do a little bit of guess work. Altogether, we came up with a sentence that basically stated that a man from a city identified by a river  traveled to a different city (a city of strength?) where he was killed. We think perhaps the sentence is suppose to be talking about Christ's crucifixion, but without actually talking to the source of the sentence, it's hard to say.

Because of this, I am really starting to relate to the frustrations that interpreters must have felt in trying to translate Egyptian hundreds of years ago. And really, with all the double meanings and ever changing use of each symbol it's a wonder that any one actually could translate Egyptian with out divine assistance. I know I certainly couldn't!