I'm never one to turn down an SRS opportunity...

As you can imagine, in the back pocket of my mind I've got 4 or 5 SearchResearch Challenges queued up and ready to go, questing ever onward bringing you the tidbits of knowledge we all need in our searching lives.

But every so often, a chance comment tilts the universe in a slightly different direction by pointing out an opportunity for a new SRS topic.

In a comment this week, Mathlady wrote that "I also encountered the problem of needing to translate signage in an unfamiliar language using an alphabet unknown to me. So I started wondering how to use Google Translate with a different alphabet..."

Excellent question.

This is a great chance to talk about how to do exactly that--read in writing systems (what the pros call "orthographies") that you don't recognize. In some cases (such as Arabic), I can't even recognize the letter boundaries.

Thanks, Mathlady, for the chance to pose a couple of interesting and potentially tricky Challenges:

1. For each of these images below: What is the language? What is the translation of the text?

A.

C.

D.