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This is actually a good opportunity for me to talk about how I arrive at my translations, since, as you can imagine, Middle Egyptian only rarely has the words you need to one-on-one translate a modern phrase. https://twitter.com/onesparkfire/status/1352375359111647233
When I'm translating a sentence, first I look at what the sentence is, what the grammar does, and what it conveys. Tone is important, but also possible idioms. The other day I was translating "Finish him" (yes, that's Mortal Kombat),
and while I could have made a literal translation since Middle Egyptian has a verb "to finish", what MEg *doesn't* have is the idiom where "finishing (off)" is used to denote killing someone.
What I do instead is flip through the TLA (an online conglomerate of most Egyptian dictionaries: http://aaew2.bbaw.de/tla/servlet/TlaLogin) and look for words that come close in meaning and tone to the thing I'm translating.
In case of "Finish him", that was the verb "to impose death". I used an imperative of the verb, a preposition, and the third person masc. singular pronoun. This says wAH mwt Hr sw; "Impose death upon him!".
I worked similarly for "OK boomer". Now the background is that @Helpmedudes79 had posted her version on Facebook, and someone on Tumblr sent me those glyphs sans context to ask if they were accurate. While they weren't completely, Francesca DID intend to say "Indeed, old man".
That's the same translation I arrived at. Why that one? A few reasons. First of all, "OK boomer" is a sentence whose meaning is derived from the intent of the sayer. It's in essence a neutral sentence, however. "Indeed, old man" is neutral too.
Secondly, "OK boomer" is a two word phrase. tiw iAw is a two word phrase as well, even if the English translation isn't (fun fact: in Dutch you can make it the colloquial "inderdaad, ouwe", and it would still be two words).
Thirdly, tiw iAw rhymes when pronounced Egyptologically*, and a large part of the success of memes is how they sound, so that was an important consideration as well.
*Because the hieroglyphic languages are consonantal languages, we're unsure how they would have been pronounced exactly in ancient Egyptian times, and we operate on an Egyptological pronunciation. It's still possible that these words didn't originally rhyme, but ssh.
So, that's it. That's my thought process when I translate memes into Middle Egyptian.
