Translating the Chinese characters was quite simple. Chinese has changed relatively little in the centuries it has been around. Thus, a message written in Chinese antiquity was easily translated by some very helpful Chinese students here at BYU.
Translating our now English phrase into Acadian or Sumerian was much more difficult. We had to consult the very helpful Professor Stratford, as well as some online resources and a book he loaned us. We came across a few different ways of going about the translation, but eventually we settled on one that worked.
One thing that was interesting to me was the process of simplification and clarification that we went through. The original literal Chinese messages read something like “If you have the strong will to do something, you will have success" and "You have the advantage if you move first." We immediately recognized the first one as being very close to an English saying: when there’s a will there’s a way. We left the other one pretty much as is. We then had to make these phrases, or these ideas, work for our new script. We came up with symbols that most closely represented the idea, rather than take the symbols for each English letter and write it out that way. This was much more efficient, and probably more representative of the way an ancient Mesopotamian would write.
This project forced me to confront some issues of translation that I had already been thinking about for a few years. Our translation was probably not perfect, but the exercise was immensely enlightening. It was a great way to wrap up everything I have learned and blogged about in this Written Knowledge unit.
One big difference I noticed between your group's process and mine was that while your most difficult task was translating from English to another language, ours was translating from Hebrew/Arabic to English. There's NO WAY we could have done it without a professor. However, we managed to get the Latin translation much easier. I assumed that this would be the same way for everyone, but if you were translating from a language that hasn't changed much over the course of time and is still spoken, it makes sense that the to-English part was easier than the from-English part for your group.
ReplyDeleteyou nailed it Jared. What made it particularly difficult, is that cuneiform is only the writing system. Each of us in our group had a different language we were working with. So, the many different languages and scripts etc. made it nigh on impossible to keep things straight. We feel we made a pretty good translation, but it could have been vastly different from the script we used in our original message.
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