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To literally translate "hieroglyphic", when referring to a largely logographic
writing system used by Ancient Egyptians, I think ヒエログリフ or something similar
would be used.

However, there's another, metaphorical, meaning in English to the term
"hieroglyphic", which is writing that's hard to understand, possibly because
it's too advanced for the person reading it as opposed to it being sloppily
written. (Meaning 3 in [English
wiktionary](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hieroglyphic#Noun))

Are there any terms in Japanese that use metaphor to convey this metaphorical
meaning?
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translation metaphor
Translation of metaphorical meaning of "hieroglyphic"
[解読不能]{かいどくふのう} would be the only word I could think of. It literally means
"indecipherable" but it could also be used when the writing itself is in one's
own language (and letters/characters) but is too difficult to read.
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Another (more) common English idiom for this is _It's all Greek to me_ and
[Eijiro offers](http://eow.alc.co.jp/search?q=all+greek+to+me) an interesting
word which I haven't encountered before:

> Don't ask me anything about computers. It's **all Greek to me**.  
>  私にコンピューターのことは聞かないで。 **ちんぷんかんぷん** なんだから。

[The theory](http://gogen-allguide.com/ti/chinpunkanpun.html) seems to be that
the word appeared in the Edo era and made fun of Confucianists who liked to
use a lot of obscure words of Chinese origin, or possibly mimicked the
unintelligible speech of foreigners.

However, this word seems to be mostly about speech, or the ideas being
explained, and not the writing itself.
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