[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] writing in German, Russian

[Paul Rakow]

    Someone in Germany might be able to guess what the machine translation
 means, but it is a bit peculiar - there is the usual problem of what
 to do with words that have several meanings - the computer here takes 
 "vital" to mean extremely important, a matter of life and death, it
 isn't smart enough to realise that "vital records" is a standard phrase. 
 Also the computer isn't clever enough to realise that assistence means
 assistance, so it just leaves the word untranslated. 
 
   However I've seen much worse - for example a program that translated
 Polish (meaning from Poland) as polish - the stuff you put on your 
 shoes, which could cause misunderstandings or offense. 
 
   Machine translators are useful for trying to read something in a 
 foreign language - because there's no harm done if the program gives
 gibberish, but still quite risky for trying to send a message to somebody. 

    A better solution for your archive letters to Germany is to use
 a free HUMAN genealogy translator. Here's how to do it: 

     Back when internet genealogy was still rather new, Arthur Teschler
 set up a translation service. It had a lot of traffic in past years,
 but has rather been forgotton now.

    You send a short text (up to about 40 lines), the subject should be
 connected with genealogy, to the address

 trans at genealogienetz.de

    IMPORTANT: Before your text put

 #ENG>GER
 if you want English turned to German,

 #GER>ENG
 for German to English. (Some other language pairs are also possible).

   The computer then sends it on to a volunteer human translator, who will
 probably do a much better job of the translation than any babelfish-style
 robot.

    Because it's a human, not a computer doing the translation, you might
 have to wait a little while for a response. Wait at least a week before
 sending a reminder, and if you do, please make it a polite one.

     You can see more about the service at
   http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~aeimhof/translat.htm

     Unfortunately this service doesn't handle Russian. 

             Hope this helps, 

                Paul Rakow
                rakow at ifh.de 

 Kenneth Browne wrote:
> 
> I've done a couple of test translations of English to Spanish and French 
> (languages that I know) and found the results to be quite acceptable. 
> Computer translations will never be perfect, but human translations 
> aren't perfect either, so this may be a useful tool for those writing 
> for archival records in German and Russian, as well as the other 
> languages mentioned.
> 
> Here are the results of translating the following sentence from English 
> to Russian and German:
> > I am writing to request assistence in locating vital records of my 
> > ancestors.
> Russian: ? ???? ? assistence ??????? ? ??????? ???????????? ??????????
> ???? ???????????????.
> 
> German: Ich schreibe zum Antrag assistence, wenn ich lebenswichtige S?tze
> meiner Vorfahren finde.
> 
> Those who know German and Russian are welcome to comment on these 
> results. I know ZERO Russian and almost zero German, so I can't comment 
> myself, but based on English-Spanish, and English-French, I thought it 
> would be worth letting list users know about this tool.
>