Editing Decipherment (section)

=== External information ===
Many successful decipherments have proceeded from the discovery of external information, a common example being through the use of [[multilingual inscription]]s, such as the [[Rosetta Stone]] (with the same text in three scripts: [[Demotic (Egyptian)|Demotic]], [[Egyptian hieroglyphs|hieroglyphic]], and [[Greek alphabet|Greek]]) that enabled the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphic. In principle, multilingual text may be insufficient for a decipherment as translation is not a linear and reversible process, but instead represents an encoding of the message in a different symbolic system. Translating a text from one language into a second, and then from the second language back into the first, rarely reproduces exactly the original writing. Likewise, unless a significant number of words are contained in the multilingual text, limited information can be gleaned from it.<ref name=":1" />