The right way is to follow the phonology of both languages and transcribe their sounds into writing. The wrong way is to transliterate all letters from A to Z one-by-one. There are ways in which you can write your name in (uniliteral) Egyptian Hieroglyphs or Coptic. This is an aside, an a personal pet-peeve of mine. OTOH, Hieratic and Demotic are extremely cursive and difficult to read, and Coptic literature is mostly gospels and psalters written in an embellished Greek font (though I haven't looked hard). They look good, they're easier to read (!) and you can give a good overview of Egyptian writing without getting into nasty details. In fact, my advice for you is to stick to Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Though for Ancient Egyptian there are texts available that deal with various subjects, for Coptic you won't find much else aside from liturgical texts, and there are a couple of interlinear Gospels around whose sources aren't quite trustworthy. You probably just need to give them a general overview. You most certainly don't need to teach Coptic or Egyptian to your primary school students. Since there's not a lot of digitally-available Coptic literature that has already been translated to English in the first place, its highly unlikely that a Coptic translation engine will be developed in the foreseeable future.Īlso, I think that you're trying to kill a fly with a cannon ball. A machine translation to Spanish will be much more reliable and accurate than one to Latin. The larger, more diverse the texts fed to the model, the better.
Google Translate, which is pretty much state-of-the-art technology, uses a statistical model which computes the most likely translation of a word based on its context, which is generated from large corpora of text with English translations. All it's good for at this time is to help you get the gist of a text in another language. Even for major languages like Mandarin Chinese and Spanish, computers have trouble with context-dependent concepts such as verb inflection and words with multiple meanings. Machine translation in general is in its infancy.