Translating
Not all of our ancestors spoke English. Some of the stuff they left behind needs to be translated. NBD in the age of iTranslate and similar apps, right?
But what if one of those languages used completely different letters less than a century ago? And you couldn’t just copy + paste it into your translation app? And the handwritten version was extra wacky? Wouldn’t that be extremely fun???
(No, no it would not.)
Allow me to introduce you to historical German… specifically Fraktur and Kurrentschrift.
This alphabet is from BYU’s Script Tutorial - German Documents, my main resource for translating historical German.
Fraktur
This was the most common print/typeface version of German from about the 16th century to WWII. As you can see from the alphabet image above, several letters look quite different from their modern counterparts. However, documents printed like this tend to be more consistent and therefore a little bit easier to translate.
Kurrentschrift
This is the historical German version of handwriting/cursive, and just like our own handwriting it is often more inconsistent and messy than the typed stuff. I have to confess that I really struggle with translating documents like this.
So, translating historical German is actually a two-step process. First you have to convert Fraktur or Kurrentschrift into a modern alphabet. After that you can work on figuring out the actual meanings of the words.
The bright side of all this is that our own language is basically a mash-up of German and Latin, so a lot of words and grammar rules are pretty easy to figure out.
If you have any experience with translating historical German, I’d love to hear your stories!