What and why does everyone want to translate into it ?

WE get several posts every day it seems

People get Sanskrit tattoos. The Sanskrit is like Arabic, curly and pretty. Plus, no one knows what it says, so it's mysterious and oh so educated-looking.

My Indian coworker knows Sanskrit (an ancient, liturgical language), the Gujarati version, and laughs hysterically at some of the tattoos people have. They say absolutely nothing, she's told me.

Here are some cultural versions of Sanskrit --

File:Phrase sanskrit.png - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phrase_sanskrit.png)

Ok, I was afraid we had some sanskrit cult starting somewhere. (LOL) I knew it was not home work, just did not know

For only $500, I can send you the correct Sanskrit for your next tattoo. (I will consult with my Indian coworker and PM you the characters. You see how it pays to work at a library and know stuff. :D)

Wow! Now that I'm thinking about it, I should do that for all the questioners who come here. That might take their minds off the women in Ghana and make me some retirement money.

Sanskrit is the root language of all the Indian and most of South East Asian languages. It is mostly used in rituals and ceremonies just as Latin is used in European countries. Only a handful people in India know its proper usage as it is no more spoken on day to day basis except for a few villages in India that traditionally speak Sanskrit. It is a member of Indo-European group of languages from which all the European and Indic languages developed further. It uses Devanagari script [The Script of City of Gods] to write which is the same script used by Hindi, Marathi, Pali and Nepali languages, too.

perhaps we should move to Ghana and start a PI service anyone who has a girlfriend there, can pay us, and we will meet them and escort them to the airport after we research them

I agree completely with drkpp. Sanskrit or Samskrutha as it is really called, is the oldest language ever known, which is still in use. There is a small village in South India(Karnataka to be precise), where they still speak this language. Actually, the only village where sanskrit is the local language.
The writing is similar to Hindi and very easy to read. Many english words come from Sanskrit like
Maathr - Mother
Braathr - Brother
There are many more which I am not very clear
Trikonamithy- trigonometry and so on.

M guessing tattoo is not really the reason since they ask you to translate and not the script.