Rosetta Stone part II

After creating our original artifact, as described in a previous post, we passed it on to another group and received a new one of our own.

We were fortunate enough to get the Latin group's artifact. I had the assignment translating their Latin inscription into English and then into Chinese. Fortunately for me, English has adopted many words from Romance Languages, so I was familiar with Latin word roots. Using my deductive skills I came up with a rough approximation of the text. I then took my approximation "Horse no trust. ... it is...party" to the great internet. It turns out that this is a famous line from the Iliad "Do not trust the horse Trojans! whatever it is, I fear the Danaans even when bearing gifts." A tricky element in finding this translation was that the letters are inconsistently formed. Some of the O s look like D s or rectangles rather than O s.
Translating our passage into Chinese was harder than translating it from Latin. Again I consulted the internet and discovered that ancient Chinese has no word for Trojan or Greek and even modern Chinese does not have a term for Danaans. Also tenses are very different in Chinese, this made it difficult to translate the progressive phrase "bringing gifts." After I thought I had an acceptable version,  I presented it to a friend from China, made a few corrections, and passed on my translation to Montana. He then took care of transferring it onto our cool bamboo scroll. See his blog for a summary of the process and a picture of our final product.
Shuan has a good post about making our original artifact.