cahn | Frederick the Great discussion post 12

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Every time I am amazed and enchanted that this is still going on! Truly DW is the Earthly Paradise!

All the good stuff continues to be archived at

rheinsberg :)

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From:

gambitten

I don't suppose you have access to download entire volumes from Hathitrust? I was assuming you didn't, because it's US-only, but it doesn't hurt to ask?

Sorry for the late reply on this; unfortunately, I don't. Oxford isn't on the list of partner institutions rip

Re: Google Translate

My issue is that I can't read the old-timey German font that everything 18th-century Prussian-related is written in. :\ And neither, apparently, can Google Translate (for archive PDFs my go-to has been taking pictures of my laptop screen with my phone and using GT that way, which is extremely inefficient, I realise). If it's in regular font, I'm usually fine with a bit of German (thanks to Duolinguo LOL). I feel bad asking for translations for minute things that I'm curious about, since I don't want to take up anybody's time

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Sorry for the late reply on this; unfortunately, I don't. Oxford isn't on the list of partner institutions rip

No worries, we have someone at UCLA who does.

My issue is that I can't read the old-timey German font that everything 18th-century Prussian-related is written in.

Neither could I in December, but I'm getting better at it! As measured by: how much less angry when I see the font, lol. Occasionally, something relevant even jumps out at me when I'm scrolling while looking for something else! I'm still much slower with it than with more familiar typefaces, but I'm now only totally defeated by it when it's a very blurry scan.

I feel bad asking for translations for minute things that I'm curious about, since I don't want to take up anybody's time

At the moment I have nothing but time, but that's going to change in a couple weeks. In any case, you can always ask, and it might end up on somebody's backlog.

selenak took a few weeks to get us the full Katte species facti translation (and that wasn't even in blackletter font), but she did it! For which we are deeply grateful and do not at all mind the delay. Everyone here is understanding that everyone else is fitting Fritz into their spare time.

I do intend to continue incorporating the recently uncovered Katte execution material into

rheinsberg, as time and health permit, and that will include the Lepel report from Hoffbauer that you expressed an interest in. I would like to get that done before I have to go back to work, but even when I go back, I'm not full time, so hopefully I continue to have time to participate in fandom. Even if the nature of that participation shifts, hopefully from more mindless work like OCR cleanup, to more interesting stuff like reading books and possibly maybe just within the realm of possibility, beefing up my French. And maybe fanfic!

Pro tip on Google translate: if the blackletter font is in a copy-pastable PDF, it's usually pretty good about OCRing properly and all you usually have to do is swap out the s's manually to get a better translation. But if it's just an image, then yeah, you have to be able to transcribe yourself. Which I can now do a page or two at a time of, but in December I just deferred altogether, and you're certainly welcome to ask for help. It never hurts to ask, especially if you're willing to wait for the response.

From:

cahn

Wait, Google translate can read your pictures?! Or am I misunderstanding your workflow?

From:

gambitten

Yep. The Google Translate app on Android can translate pictures, but even it seems to struggle with old-timey German fonts and scanned artifacts. I use it when the text is not selectable, which is usually the case for old scans.