I didn’t mean to
piggy-back on yesterday’s post about letters, but I do have an exciting find to
report. I’ve mentioned the difficulty in translating the German letters in the
family collection. Since it’s worth a thousand words, here is a sample:
So, you can see
the challenge here. But, I’ve struck gold. I’ve found my Rosetta stone:
What
may look like more German scribbling, is, well, more German scribbling, but my grandfather
has penciled in the modern German
over the old script which means there is hope of translating the letters
through this and technology.
Technology
is already a key in this project. As you can see, some of the writing is rather
small. This has been an issue with even the letters written in English,
especially the V-mail ones. Scanning the letter and then viewing it digitally
has allowed me to quickly enlarge the letter and make it more readable. Of
course, all the storage and indexing will be using currently available tech as
well as sharing through blogs and any future websites.
Optical character recognition
is a rapidly improving field, but even the experts think this type of transcribing
might not be feasible, but with this “Rosetta” letter there is hope of at least
recognizing this individual’s hand writing. Perhaps, only by entire words or groups
of letters, but, since it is repetitious grunt work and that is what computers
excel at, it is possible someday.
I
know my grandfather did some work on these letters, too. Some of the large envelopes
held groups of letters and he labeled the exterior “From Parents,” “While he
was abroad,” etc. He labeled some pictures that would have gone nameless
without his effort. And this transcription, which will prove to be the most
valuable contribution of all. I have no doubt that there are elements of this
project that will have to be handed down to the next generation, too. They’ll
be able to use technology that is as foreign to me as an iPad was to my
grandfather. But, since we have the letters, we’ll make the time.
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