The Rosetta Balsa Wood

So here is the picture of our final product for the Rosetta Stone Project.  Yes that's right - you have here a sampling of modern English, Akkadian written in cuneiform, and some Mayan glyphs (you have to turn your head to read them by the way).

So the process after receiving our Akkadian clay tablet was a lot harder than anyone expected.  A number of us started to try to find the characters and look up which syllables they represented independently.  Luckily Erin was able to visit with a professor who gave her some more direction.  It turns out that not all the characters were actually correct - revealing to us why it was no one could find a few of them.  After translating all we could, we had to find the original document that the other group used in order fill in the gaps and get it translated to English ---------->
 

 With that done, Holland and Brianne headed up the artistic process (with Will's help and materials of course) of getting the cuneiform written on our "wood paper." This also proved to be very difficult because the ink bleeds easily in the porous wood.  They ended up having to use a SUPER fine pen to get everything to fit as small as possible.

I again was in charge of the Mayan translation which was difficult of course, because 1-Mayan is not completely deciphered yet 2: I am still shady on Mayan syntax and grammar 3: There are not equivalent words in Mayan, English, and Akkadian.   This is something that I have realized as I have volunteered as a Spanish medical translator too.  Sometimes things really are just "lost in translation," whether it is because of translator error, or meanings difficult to express in another language, copy errors, bias of a translator, or just plain laziness in translation.  It is not an easy task.

This was a difficult assignment for MANY reasons but I really liked the idea of it and had fun learning about these mayan glyphs.  I think that it really helped me understand how knowledge is passed on and how that really has changed from the age of writing to typing to the pixel.  I also think this project helped us think creatively in order to solve problems that were completely unfamiliar to us.

The Chinese gift

Qufu

For the Rosetta stone project  I had the opportunity to work with the group representing Asia. Two of us represented China, one Japan, and one Cambodia. Because the majority of our group represented China, and China represents the majority of the world, we thought it best to portray China in our project.
Our first thought was to have a quote from Confucius on rice paper. This would have been culturally significant because paper was invented in China (see Shuan's post on this). However, attempts at making rice paper were disastrous. Contrary to popular belief, at least my own and that of my group members, rice paper is not actually made out of rice. It is made out of rice straw or more modernly wood fiber,, mulberry, or bamboo. Also the arguably most famous Confucius artifact is actually the Confucius temple of Qufu. Confucius sayings are inscribed in stone.