For Immediate Release ~~~~~ Dateline - May, 2001


Contact:
Ruth Marlene Friesen
(306)225-2138
For email use Contact form

Gothic German Translator

Ruth Marlene Friesen, a writer from Hague, Saskatchewan, offers a unique translation service on the internet. She will translate from the handwritten Gothic German to English.

In June 2000 Friesen put up some web pages announcing her service, and listed them in the search engines. Then she got busy on other projects and almost forgot about her offer. Until April of this year when suddenly within a week, she had not one, but three translation jobs from people who had found her web pages on Gothic translation.

Though she studied German grammar in high school, it was from her grandmother, Elisabeth Kroeker, that Friesen learned to decipher and read the old handwritten German. Modern German uses the Roman letter shapes since the Sutterlein scripts were banned by Hitler's regime. Old letters, documents, diaries and journals written by grandparents or ancestors in the 1800s or early 1900s used an elegant spidery script called Gothic.

Friesen translated her grandmother's daily journals for her family history book, A Godly Inheritance, in 1985. From 1991-1992 she worked over her grandmother's step-grandmother's journals and notebooks. When neighbors asked her to do some smaller translation projects she realized that there is hardly anyone else willing to do this. People older than she, who are still able to read the Gothic script are not up to providing such a service to others. Or they say that their English is too weak to find equivalent words.

University trained literary translators charge as much as $1.00/word, but few would touch the old handwritten Gothic script. Friesen feels comfortable charging .10/word as it seems fairly easy money, except when the writing is too scrawled or faint to see. "If it's easy to do, I can give discounts. If I get swamped again with work like I did this April, I may have the courage to raise my fees!" Friesen laughs. "Otherwise, people just have to line up and wait their turn."

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Call (306)225-2138 for an interview.


For more information see the Gothic translation pages,
Gothic Translation

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