Sumerian is the first language for which we have written evidence and its literature the earliest known. The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, a project of the University of Oxford, comprises a selection of nearly 400 translated literary compositions recorded on sources which come from ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) and date to the late third and early second millennia BCE. Not enough for you? Why not impress your friends (and confuse your enemies) by translating some english words into Sumerian?
posted by Effigy2000 on Sep 20, 2007 - 39 comments

Knack for language? Great! Gay? No thanks. Interesting WaPo story of how DoD desparately needs linguists trained in Arabic, but dismisses linguists when it comes out that they are gay.
posted by cpfeifer on Dec 3, 2003 - 34 comments

Ahye Matey! He's mean and one-eyed and known simply as "unidentified translator" .
posted by stbalbach on Oct 19, 2001 - 20 comments

Your site in Chinese. I picked this one up out of my logs. Enter your URL, hit return, wheet, there it is, your site in simplified Chinese. Dunno how accurate it is, but goddamned, it's the coolest thing I've seen in, oh, almost 16 hours.

You need to be running a browser and OS that handles Chinese characters for this to work, by the way. Mac users can install the appropriate freebies off of their OS 9 or 8.6 disks; it's a custom install. Windows users can download some big software turd. At least Internet Explorer on both platforms will display Chinese characters correctly once the system extensions are installed.
posted by Mo Nickels on May 28, 2000 - 1 comment