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Translation barrier

Joseph Lloyd Costner
Joseph Lloyd Costner ✭
February 20 edited February 28 in Suggest an Idea

I've started to work on the South Africa—Dutch Reformed Church Registers, 1660–1970 [Part D][M3FF-BVX] project and I've finally decided to bring up this minor problem. On certain records ( like the one I'm working on right now), some indexers would classify what I believe to be a church membership record to be instead a baptism record. Now to be fair, I have used google translate to understand what has been written/typed in some of the records.

My question is, could a translation program be installed into FamilySearch or do we just have to "wing it?" Also, is it a church membership record I'm working on?

If you'd like, I won't submit the record until you have drawn a conclusion from this.

Thank you

Tagged:
  • Indexing
  • Indexing Enhancements
  • Translate Unindexed records
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Active · Last Updated February 20

Comments

  • Joseph Lloyd Costner
    Joseph Lloyd Costner ✭
    February 20

    Actually, don't answer the second question. I know it's a church membership record

    0
  • Julia Szent-Györgyi
    Julia Szent-Györgyi ✭✭✭✭✭
    February 20

    I am firmly of the belief that if you need a machine translator to make sense of an image, then you have no business indexing that image. Therefore, I think FamilySearch should definitely not add any sort of translator to its indexing tools.

    (Indexers who don't know the language produce indexes where "father unknown" or "stillborn" are entered as names, or where the father's title is turned into a surname, or a mother is created out of the father's occupation and religion. Unfortunately, I don't believe that providing a dictionary would help in such cases, because the indexer wouldn't use it: if he believes an entry to be a name, then he does not expect it to be in the dictionary, and hence will not look it up. And even if he does look it up, if he's misreading Tisztelendő as "Fiztdeado", he's not going to get anywhere.)

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