Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in 100 objects from BBC Radio 4.
If you want to test the old cliché that an act of translation is always an act of betrayal,
then the internet automated translation services will give you lots of happy ammunition.
I fed into it the sentence which is the theme for this week's programs.
"This week," I typed, "we're spinning the globe,
looking at some of the world's religions around 700 years ago
and at how different cultures used objects to bring gods and humans nearer to each other."
Once this sentence had been translated from English into French,
then from French into Greek and then from Greek back into English,
it read: "This week we turn ball that looks at certain of religions of world this there at about 700 years
and the way which different cultures has adopted objects to bring more almost gods and humans from each other."
It's an amusingly crude exercise,
but when it comes to translating complex ideas from a lost culture with no written language,
we can't be confident of doing much better
as we work our way through layers of later interpretation by people with quite different ways of thinking.
To get anywhere near an original understanding of this program's object,
we have to go through a filter of two later cultures with two different languages,
and even then, we're not quite sure where we stand.
It's an object that's always intrigued me,
and I'm less and less sure that I understand it.