The most famous object in the British Museum may tell two stories about great cultures clashing—the Greeks and Egyptians, when it was created, and the French and English, when it was unearthed—but mostly it’s great because it symbolizes DECODING, translation, in the most dramatic way possible. As a professional translator/interpreter, my bosom swells with pride to think of how crucial our work is, how ancient its tradition, how magical it is. It’s not about WHAT you’re translating. In my case, I mostly translate old opera libretti; in the Rosetta Stone, we’re talking about one of those 1040 Tax Return guides, rules about exemptions available to farmers and gamblers and clergymen, that kind of thing. I mean, who cares? Except that the translator had to care, at least long enough to get the text from one language into the next.
What I love about translating is that when you’re qualified, it just happens. You just think the thought, and the words come out in whatever language is required by the situation. There’s something extremely satisfying, fulfilling, magical about that, when you get to that place of complete trust and confidence in your own ability to listen to or read in another language and know what’s going on, and how best to render that same thought in a parallel language. Ever since I started studying French when I was 12, I’ve been blessed with a facility for it; but it’s like a muscle, that’s what’s cool about it. At some point you train the muscles to the place where, sure, you can bike from Seattle to Portland. The same way, you train your brain so that, sure, you can hop back and forth across the English Channel; or, in the Rosetta Stone’s case, the Mediterranean. I hereby salute all translators, all those who build bridges among people using language!
The historical significance of the Rosetta Stone is that the document carved on this rock allowed scholars to decode the ancient Egyptian written language. This tax code, issued under one of the Ptolomaic kings who (speaking Greek) ruled Egypt in the centuries after Alexander the Great, was written in Greek, for the rulers, and in Demotic (a phonetic alphabet for the Egyptian language, so that it was relevant to the people in Egypt) and in hieroglyphics, as a concession this weak King Ptolomey was making to the powerful Egyptian priestly class. (By this point in history, hieroglyphics were basically obsolete—they’re pictographs, and phonic alphabets are much easier to use. But by including them here, Ptolomey was able to make the priests feel important.)
When Napoleon’s men, trying to conquer Egypt from the Ottomans before the British did in the early 19th century—both racing to dominate the eventual Suez Canal)—unearthed the stone, it took both a French scholar (Champollion) and an English one (Young), cooperating, to decipher it. But would their respective nations ever cooperate on anything, for example, improving the situation for the people who lived in Egypt at the time? Not bloodly likely, mon vieux!
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