HELP US REVIVE A DISAPPEARING GERMAN LITERATURE

One of the goals of the Centenary Initiative is to find a way to increase the amount of German literature available on the battle – both in German language as well as in translation.

Many of the original German language texts were printed in hard-to-read Gothic Fraktur text. We have found a way, using Optical character recognition (OCR) software to translate these text with around 90% accuracy. The remaining 10% we are manually finishing to eliminate obviuously computer-generated text with a human touch.

This is where you come in. Do you want to be a part of the project ?

1. You can either volunteer to finish a chapter
2. or take on an entire book
3. You may suggest a book to us for OCR

Working with Peter Schenk in Berlin we have given Arno Dohm’s Skagerrak a new German text readable by all. A next step will be to translate the new German text into Google English which can then be similarly finsihed. Manually by any one of us.

Click on the two pdf’s to see the before, during and after look of the text.

1. Please, complete the form. This is so that we can start a dialogue and other people who may want to work with you can contact you directly. Either use your real name or a user name.
2. Choose your project
   1. Name of the book.
   2. Completion of a Full book or selection of one chapter
3. We recommend selecting one chapter « to get the hang » of it.
4. Complete the formalities : register, select start date and target date
5. When you have a finished document, upload it and it will either join the other chapters on a book or will be the entire book.
6. The Project team will then review the work, looking for easy corrections to make (like names, places etc.) trying to maintain consistency in the style of writing and in the editing formalities.
7. As books get completed we build a lexicon which will help the ongoing OCR process by suggesting word solutions.

Once a book has been approved by our editorial group, we will either bring the work to market through an established publisher or self-publish. Many times, e-formats will be used to bring the materials to a wider audience at a lower cost.

Your contribution will be recognized, either attached to a chapter or to an entire book.

You can see the books available for transaltion into modern German. Simply click here :

Or you can choose to take a modern German text book which we have already put through Google translate and give back a refined and fully corrected English verison.

Please use the blog to pass on your experience and learnings so that others can speedily benefit. Also suggest new titles on the blog and see what other peoples’ reactions are. If they positive, we’ll take the project.

A short note on OCR scanning

No company officially supports scanning and translating old German Gothic Fraktur text documents. All documents used in this section have been scanned with the kind help if Andrew Gillard in the U.K. Andrew’s email : andrew@gillardediting.co.uk.