Getting to grips with influential books — in 9th century alphabet

Most of us have been asked how many of the world’s 100 most influential books we have read — but how many could identify them when written in Georgian using the 9th century Nuskhuri alphabet?

That was the task facing the Irish team in competition with teenagers from around the world at this week’s International Linguistics Olympiad at Manchester University.

The four-strong team had four hours on Thursday to translate as many titles as possible, ranging from the relatively well-known Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to ancient philosophical texts such as the Hindu Upanishads, and the History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides.