The Linguist

10 The Linguist Vol/65 No/1 ciol.org.uk/thelinguist FEATURES Carolin Sommer considers the multi-faceted challenges of translating handwritten texts, focusing on WWII materials I love a puzzle, and who doesn't? Apart from sudokus – numbers aren't my thing; I'm a translator after all. But give me a word game and I'm hooked. I like to think I'm pretty good at them, too, and I don't give up until I've cracked them. So imagine my surprise – and shock – when, many years ago now, my mother showed me some cherished handwritten letters and recipes from my late grandmother, and I couldn't read them. It wasn't because they were in German but because the letters looked like some secret scribbled code: the old German Sütterlin script. It was totally unfamiliar to me. Faced with a mystery I couldn't unravel, I nearly had to admit defeat. Not one to give up easily, however, I decided to teach myself to read this strange font that was widely used in Germany between 1917 and 1941. It was exciting, but once I was able to read my Oma's documents I wanted to put my newfound skill to good use. But how to practise? Having provided pro bono translations for the Wiener Holocaust Library in London, I wondered if they might have some handwritten documents that I could try to decipher. As luck would have it, they were able to put me in touch with a gentleman who was looking for someone to translate his late mother's letters, which were all written in some illegible script. Fast forward a decade and deciphering handwritten material has become one of the mainstays of my freelance business. Now I help my clients solve their puzzles by translating letters, diaries and historical documents for them. Some want to find out certain details about their family history or build a family tree going back generations; others are prospective authors doing research into a historical personality or group of people. Many are children and grandchildren of Jewish refugees who escaped Nazi Germany during the 1930s. They all have one thing in common: their German documents are deemed 'impossible to read'. So, it's a good thing I love puzzles, as the challenges are many and varied. The breadcrumbs of family history Like many translators, the first questions I usually get asked are 'How much will it cost?' and 'When can you do it?' In the UK, we look at the number of words involved and, ideally, ask to see a sample, if not the whole text, to assess the source material before answering. Nowhere does this apply more than when quoting for handwritten material, where the number of words is just one factor of many. A key question is how many authors we are dealing with. Different people have very different handwriting styles, and that applies for the old Sütterlin as well as its predecessor Kurrent or any modern script. Historical records from different church books, for example, will likely be written by different clerks. A collection of letters may well involve several writers. The presence of multiple authors means getting used to different scripts, and that takes time. With my clients located all over the world and their material being precious, I prefer to work with digital copies instead of originals, which are often too fragile to handle much. However, even with high-resolution scans or photographs, if the original letter was written in faint pencil on purple blotting paper, which in hard times they often were, no amount of zooming in or adjusting the contrast settings on screen is going to make the writing appear clear. Add a number of worn-out folds and dog-ears into the mix, and the challenge to fill in the blanks only grows. I always ask my clients for as much background information as they are happy to share. It's not just because I am interested in their stories, but also because one type of word is particularly tricky to decipher: proper nouns. Knowing the names of family members who may be mentioned in personal letters, or knowing where the family came from, really helps in determining whether the name of the auntie is Anna or Irma, or whether the birthplace of a new nephew is a village beginning with W near Nuremberg or a small town beginning with M near Hanover. Similarly, seeing how the author writes their own name and hometown helps me decipher other words in the same document which may otherwise have been tricky. This is especially true when they include letters that often have an individual flair and are therefore difficult to distinguish from one another, like M and W, or V and W, or even G, Y and Z. The added challenge here is history itself. Germany's borders have fluctuated wildly over the course of the last thousand years, and the German Reich once extended all the way east to Kaliningrad in modern Russia. Even areas of modern-day Czechia or Ukraine were German-speaking at one time, and every village, town and city had a German name. After World War II those places reverted to their local names. Decoding the scrawl

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