Using AI To Translate WW2 Documents - My Experience

If anyone who's sees this and is fluent in German would like to help me after reading this please email me.

I collect Canada WW2 postal history and this includes the German POWs held in Canada. I do not speak or read German which can be a problem. Recently I have been using various free versions of A.I.s to translate scans of some POW letters. They all (Chat GPT, Claude and Copilot) can apparently read the German writing OK from the scan but I have recently found that the translations they produce can be very different. I tend to trust Claude 5 the most at the moment but you have to be careful.

As an experiment I scanned a letter (neat and legible writing) from a survivor of U-27 and sent it to the three A.I.s above. After a "discussion" with Claude about the translation of the letter and even asking its opinion of the translation from Copilot - It was illuminating and creepy how human a machine can sound - I put the whole chat into a word document. I have not yet asked Chat GPT about Claude's translation

I do not think I can attach the word file to this message so if anyone would like to read it and what one AI thought of another AI translation ability please email me and I will send it to you. Especially if you can read the original German. I want to understand how good the translation are. I see no reason why the comments would not apply to other languages.

We have seen a couple of examples of translated German documents here. Most do well for much of the text but always include a lot of nonsense that makes the full content nonsensical.

The AI tools, however, do appear to be helpful in deciphering handwriting and, in the case of German, the old alphabets.

How good or bad the translations are depends on how common the translation is.
German to English will be much better trained than Dutch to Czech.

There's also Transkribus, a free service (up to 50 scans a month) set-up by leading European universities, with a focus on translating handwriting:

https://www.transkribus.org/

"READ-COOP SCE is a European Cooperative Society founded in 2019 in Innsbruck, Austria. We develop and maintain Transkribus, the leading AI-powered platform for handwritten text recognition.

As a cooperative, we are owned by our members — universities, archives, libraries, and individuals across more than 35 countries. Every profit is reinvested into our mission, not distributed to shareholders.

Our platform covers the entire workflow of making historical documents accessible: from scanning and AI-assisted transcription to search, annotation, and online publication."

Good luck,

Steve Taylor