I have a book consisting of letters my mother and aunt sent as children during the first two years of WWII from Luxembourg, where they and their parents were waiting to emigrate to the U.S., to their aunt who had remained in Germany with her mother. The aunt transcribed the letters by hand into the blank book, and pasted in photos, drawings, and other memorabilia her nieces had sent. My mother’s family arrived in New York in 1941 and her aunt (my grandmother’s youngest sister) sent the book to them sometime after that. Subsequently, the aunt and her mother were shipped to a ghetto in Poland and later murdered in the camps.
The book consists of some 90 pages of handwritten text, all in the aunt’s handwriting, averaging between 100 and 150 words per page, so perhaps 11,000-13,000 words in total. I have had estimates from several professional translators in the neighborhood of $2,500, but this is more than I can afford at the moment.
Does anyone know of other options that might cost me less, even at the price of lower quality? AFAICT, freely available automated translation technology has not progressed to the point of being able to decipher handwriting.
I thought of the possibility of crowdsourcing the translation, but I don’t know how I’d go about getting that done. Does anyone know of projects like this being crowdsourced, or have any suggestions of how it might be accomplished?
Other thoughts? Thanks.
