On Mar 10, 11:18 pm, twoplanters wrote: > My wife's (deceased) grandmother spent years in the Ukraine hiding > from Nazis during the Holocaust. She is writing a book based on > Granny's audio tapes (in Yiddish) and several (Hebrew) documents. > Several people have helped us translate most of the materials but some > remains untranslated. > > We note, with considerable skepticism, that Google Translate claims > to be able to translate Yiddish documents to English. First, very few > people still speak (Western) Yiddish which is based in Hebrew and > Medieval German. > > Second, it's our understanding that Yiddish is a spoken language and > Hebrew is the written equivalent so we wonder what Google means by > translating Yiddish (documents, pages) to English. > > Finally, the (Hebrew) documents are hardcopy not digital files. > > Sounds like we need human (not computer) assistance :-) > > Ideas? Corrections?
Many people speak Yiddish today! According to Wikipedia, there are over 100000 speakers in New York alone. You are right that few people speak the western dialect of Yiddish (I had heard it was extinct, but wikipedia disagrees - it may be a matter of definitions), but it seems unlikely that your grandmother in law did either. By translating from Yiddish to English, Google apparently means translating from written Yiddish, of the non-extinct variety, written using the Hebrew alphabet, into American English. Judging by what others have said in this forum, it may work best on Yiddish written in the Russian spelling norm. I don't know what you mean by hardcopy, but Google Translate needs plain text files to work on, or PDF files which have the plain text embedded (scanned PDFs usually won't have this). You ALWAYS need human assistance if you want a translation you want to keep, or show to others. If it's just for yourself, to get a rough idea of what it says, Google Translate may be good enough. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "General" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-translate-general?hl=en.
