Hieroglyphs.

We're living in the age of automated translation, and it's actually getting where, in some cases, it's possible to work with the outcome. Mind you, proper translations made by human beings who are fluent in both the source and the target language will always be a lot better, but at least things are not always complete gobbledigook anymore.

How is that topic popping up here, you ask? Well, because of some going-s-off-on-a-tangent. (In German, by the way, I'd say "vom Hölzchen auf's Stöckchen kommen", which literally is to get to a small piece of wood from a stick. There's no translation that really catches this in English - it's when you start with something and then have another topic and then another. Kind of like when you want to look something up in an encyclopaedia and accidentally read another entry first, or afterwards, and there's a cross-reference to something else, so of course you read that too, and then on the way to the next one something else catches your eye...)

So - I was wondering about translating stuff into hieroglyphs, and did an internet search and found that most "translators" only do a phonetic transcription, which sort of defeats the purpose. But it turns out that there is a sort-of translator by Google, called Fabricius. the amount of words on there is, unfortunately, limited, but it's still sort of fun. There's also this helpful list of dictionaries where you can look up things - and more or less make your own translations.