In my two decades of translating Yiddish texts as an academic and as a freelance Yiddish translator, I have encountered a garden variety of Yiddish handwritings. In this blog post I summarize some of the issues that make the translation of Yiddish handwritten texts tricky, to say the least. Thereby, I also hope to provide an insight into the methodology of – and considerations around – providing quotes for Yiddish translation services.
Letter from the The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, UC Berkeley (source: Flickr)
Yiddish handwriting can be notoriously difficult to read. So much so that even most native Yiddish speakers find it hard or even impossible to decipher old Yiddish letters. It takes years of practice, much patience, and quite some linguistic skills to make sense of such texts. No wonder that institutions such as the University of Chicago and Tel Aviv University offer specialized courses on the art of reading handwritten Yiddish.
That said, even if your prized Yiddish letters look illegible, despair not! Chances are, I’ve seen and translated Yiddish texts in way worse conditions than that of your trove. While a text might appear undecipherable to an untrained eye, it can usually be translatable in its entirety.
Orthography
Yiddish orthography was most notably standardized in the early Soviet Union, and then by YIVO in 1937. However, handwritten Yiddish texts rarely follow either standard. That is to say, different people writing in Yiddish follow a variety of spelling conventions, with variations by region, level of Jewish religious and Yiddish education, etc. Oftentimes, spelling might even be inconsistent within a Yiddish text written by a single author.
Vocabulary
There is substantial variation between Yiddish vocabularies. On the one hand, this phenomenon has a regional element: in Slavic-speaking regions Jews tended to use loanwords from Slavic languages, while the Yiddish of Jews in the US is often peppered with Anglicisms and loanwords from English – the latter oftentimes take some hard thinking to decipher based on the transliteration of English words to the (unstandardized) Yiddish alphabet.
On the other hand, there is a sociolinguistic factor at play: rabbis, scholars, and the like were wont to use lomdish (‘scholarly’) Yiddish vocabulary heavy on loshn-koydesh (Hebrew and Aramaic) components. At the same time, the Yiddish of especially of Jews from German-speaking countries – but also of educated Jews from countries where German was a dominant lingua franca – is German-inflected or even Judeo-German (German with Yiddish characters).
Penmanship
One can get a hang of the peculiarities of the given orthography fairly quickly, and while the vocabulary might contain some challenging tidbits, there are great dictionaries available for a Yiddish translator in need. When translating Yiddish handwritten texts, the greatest challenge –by a long shot – is deciphering the handwriting.
As in any other language, handwritings show great variation from one individual to another. This, especially coupled with the differences in spelling (orthography) might mean a considerable challenge even for the most experienced of Yiddish translators. See a few interesting examples in this blog post over at the Center for Jewish History.
Complicating matters further, writers of Yiddish letters, postcards, and the like often endeavored to make the most of the sheets or postcard space available to them – these were precious commodities, especially considering the added postage costs. Thus, the handwriting on Yiddish postcards and letters is often overly crammed, with lines written or added last minute vertically and upside down – using even smaller letters.
Quality
Nowadays, anyone with a smartphone can take a perfectly adequate picture of a Yiddish text they wish to have translated. However, most Yiddish family letters and postcards were written 80-120 years ago, and time has taken its toll. Tearing, ink fading and/or bleeding through are the most common issues.
Summaries and batches
At times, clients approach me asking to provide summaries, rather than literal translations of Yiddish handwritten documents. While I have done so a number of times, this method only works reasonably well in the case of the most legible handwritings. These can be skimmed and summarized without having to spend too much time on deciphering the penmanship– for a proportionally lower fee. However, in the vast majority of cases, it is deciphering the text that takes up a good 80-90% of the time, while the time spent on typing up the translation and looking up the occasional word in the dictionary is negligible in comparison.
The advantage of having batches of Yiddish letters written by the same person or the same set of people is that once I get used to the orthography and the penmanship of a person, translating further texts by the same person is increasingly easier. Therefore am I able to offer exponentially larger discounts for such batches. For larger batches of unidentified letters, I also propose to initially draw up a list with the name of the writer(s) and addressee(s), as well as the date and location, so that you can prioritize the letters to be translated.
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