I don't think she's meant to be translating word for word, all she that says is descriptive of the imagery given by the shadowcasters - like they way kids can read storybooks by using the illustrations to help them before they can read fluently. Her fancy translation skills stop exactly at the point of the last 'picture' when the text becomes more abstract. Which is not say she's not smart to do that but she's not had to have learnt Sumerian to achieve it.
Sumerian is not only a dead language it has no known relative and a limited number of writings for lingusits to work from. Its reconstruction is still very incomplete both grammar and vocabulary are still only parially understood so although it's possible to come up with translations of some of the texts they're still much argued over and I think any scholar would claim to know enough to speak it even (if the speaker weren't bothered about it sounding like it did when last spoken).
You might enjoy annakovsky's story "Umad learns Sumerian" (http://annakovsky.livejournal.com/9587.html#cutid1), the writer was a student doing ancient languages so it's quite a realistic take on the linguistic aspects as well as a wonderful Dawn character piece.
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Sumerian is not only a dead language it has no known relative and a limited number of writings for lingusits to work from. Its reconstruction is still very incomplete both grammar and vocabulary are still only parially understood so although it's possible to come up with translations of some of the texts they're still much argued over and I think any scholar would claim to know enough to speak it even (if the speaker weren't bothered about it sounding like it did when last spoken).
You might enjoy annakovsky's story "Umad learns Sumerian" (http://annakovsky.livejournal.com/9587.html#cutid1), the writer was a student doing ancient languages so it's quite a realistic take on the linguistic aspects as well as a wonderful Dawn character piece.