AI as "magnifying glass" to translate selective old hand written text
Dear all,
Would it be possible to use AI like a "magnifying glass" to translate selective old hand written text (instead of having AI to translate a whole page) in e.g. scanned old church records?
Best regards
Thorsten
PS. AI based "magnifying glass" - the modern urim & thummim😉
Answers
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@thorstenhadzik1 Yes, that’s exactly the direction things are moving. The Church is actively using full‑text search tools that rely on AI, and you can absolutely use tools like Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini, and others to help with transcribing or translating handwriting from historical images. It can be a wonderful boost to your research. I usually take a small clip of the handwriting I want help with, then ask an AI tool to “transcribe and translate.” After pasting the image into the AI, it will read the handwriting, create a transcription, and then provide a translation.
CAUTION: Old handwriting is challenging even for experienced humans, so AI can struggle too. It may guess, skip, or confidently produce something that isn’t right. Treat its output as a helpful starting point rather than a final answer, and always double‑check the results through another source or your own expertise to make sure the reading is accurate.
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Thanks, that is a good idea to try.
But I think the result could be even improved if we could use the same AI which is currently being trained by the Church instead of using an un-trained AI e.g. ChatGPT.
Would that be possible?0 -
One of my first experiences with the "magnifying glass" approach was during a session of indexing Samoan birth records. The system assigned these to me when I selected "intermediate English" but to my surprise the batch wasn't in English at all—it was in Samoan. But I had recently seen a Google Lens app on my cell phone that uses the camera and provides a translation of the text so I gave it a try, exactly like taking a picture through my cell phone.
What I saw next nearly took my breath away: It was an image of the birth record on my phone screen but it was all written in English text, as though the original document had been in English the whole time!
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