After Clark's heat vision went haywire and he burned the symbol for "hope" onto his barn, reclusive scientist Dr. Virgil Swann saw the subsequent newspaper coverage of the incident and sent Clark a series of emails that captured our favorite farmboy's interest. Swann sent Clark this Instant Message (and the missing comma frustrates me... Dr. Swann, a brilliant PhD should have been more careful with his punctuation!), which Clark explained means "I'm a friend."
The reasoning behind this translation is beyond understanding. One could point out that the phrase "I'm a friend" is made up of three syllables, or one could break it down into three key words ("I am friend"), to try to make sense of the three symbols in the IM. The first symbol looks like some kind of warped Z or T, or maybe both stuck together. The second symbol looks like a rotated L plus the letter U. The third symbol looks like an N with a dot next to it, or an R with the dot in the wrong place and the horizontal line at the bottom missing. At any rate, how one can get "I'm a friend" from those symbols is beyond me.
Swann sent Clark an invitation to come to his office in New York, and the invite featured the "hope" symbol.
In Swann's office, there was a good deal of writing in Kryptonian. Here's a shot of the blackboard behind Swann's desk:
I'm not sure what the diagram is supposed to be (it's probably a drawing of Krypton), but the top symbol is an S, then a T, then a V, then a D, then the last three aren't Kryptonian letters.
Dr. Swann gave Clark a message from his biological parents on a large screen in his office. I have provided two screenshots to give different views of the message as it scrolled by.
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The message is a little confusing to translate because some of it is backwards (in the second picture, for example, note how the third word of the third line is the first word of the fourth line backwards). The message, in its entirety, reads, "This is Kal-El of Krypton, our infant son, our last hope... Please protect him and deliver him from evil." Another poignant message for Clark was "We will be with you, Kal-El... For all the days of your life."
Clark became aware of another Kryptonian message when he visited Swann for a second time in "Legacy." Time, however, the message originated from Earth rather than the stars and was meant for Jonathan. The message was simply three words repeated over and over again: "I am waiting."
