Comment by ObviousScience

11 years ago

Just to prove a sibling comment's point, I copied and pasted all of your translations in to Google, where it was able to auto-detect the language based on how text encoding works, and was able to render them in to my native language. It took under 5 minutes to do all of them. (I got the languages Polish, Swahili, Yiddish, and Japanese.)

I doubt it would have been nearly so trivial had you given us sound clips or a picture of those words written out.

It's simply the case that digital strings, of which text is a kind, are most amenable to algorithmic manipulation, and are the basis of most of our computing tools. Even when computers deal with other types of data, the first step is almost always to reduce it to this form. (Which would have been the case with a picture of the characters written - it would have located the characters and recreated the digital text.)