We present a translation of looping alternating two-way automata into a comparably inexpressive description logic, which is contained in SHIQ. This enables us to perform the emptiness test for a language accepted by such an automaton using the systems FaCT and Racer. We implemented our translation and performed a test using automata which accept models for ALCIO concepts, so that we can use SHIQ systems to reason about nominals. Our empirical results show, however, that the resulting knowledge bases are hard to process for both systems.