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.