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Comment by kmoser | Hacker News Reader

What surprised me most is that there isn't a ton of publicly available information on translating ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics that would make this reasonably easy, or even a website that would allow one to enter an English phrase and get back the hieroglyphic equivalent.

Oh, wait, there is: https://lingojam.com/HieroglyphicsTranslator except its translation of "Welcome, the entire land" looks very different from the symbols in the article.

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It looks like this isn't an actual translator, it's just transcribing the consonants into uniliteral hieroglyphs.

> Oh, wait, there is:

As far as I can tell this is a transliterator, not a translator. It's just turning latin letters into hieroglyphs as you type them. I don't know how accurate the transliteration is.

It would be like coming up with a sequence of Chinese characters that sounds like an English sentence when pronounced by a Mandarin speaker. Nothing really to do with translation.

> It would be like coming up with a sequence of Chinese characters that sounds like an English sentence when pronounced by a Mandarin speaker. Nothing really to do with translation.

Actually this does happen for some foreign terms/loan words, like the names of other countries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcription_into_Chinese_cha...

Another great example is https://www.blueridgejournal.com/poems/mots01-unpetit.htm

Getting a native French speaker to recite these to native English speakers is hilarious! Especially when the French speaker is trying to work out why what they've said is seemingly so funny.

Sir say "tray bean". Mercy.

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