24 Translating Archives

Introduction

Spanning three courses since 2016, advanced undergraduate and graduate French students at Kansas State University have translated French-language archival materials as the primary component of a translation course. In the first iteration of this course, the documents were typed letters from Charles de Gaulle held by the Richard L. D. and Marjorie J. Morse Department of Special Collections at Kansas State University^[1] and in subsequent iterations, students translated a handwritten World War I soldier’s diary held by the National World War I Museum and Archive.^[2] These translation projects presented significant pedagogical challenges, but in the end, they also demonstrated some advantages over more traditional translation projects in which students translate literary texts.

This chapter presents an approach to teaching archival materials in translation courses. I begin with a short history of the archival translation projects in my own courses, followed by a brief general discussion of tips for locating archival sources in languages other than English. Next, I discuss the challenges of using archival materials in a translation class, including deciphering handwriting (which is more difficult when reading in a second language), linguistic barriers, and providing historical contextualization for archival sources. I follow this discussion with recommendations for addressing these challenges with language learners specifically. Finally, I outline one approach to embedding archival sources into a semester-long translation course, including discussion of scaffolding assignments for archival translation and assessing archival translations.

History of the Projects

The first iteration of the translation course was co-taught with Dr. Melinda A. Cro. She was approached by special collections librarians at Kansas State University because the university had recently received a gift of typed letters to and from Charles de Gaulle, dating from his time in the UK during World War II. She was asked about producing translations of these letters, and we agreed to co-teach a translation course for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in which they would produce translations of the letters for the archive. We applied for and received a Visiting Regional Humanities Fellowship from the University of Kansas’s Hall Center for the Humanities, which gave us time to learn more about the letters and to prepare rubrics for components of the course, as well as to develop a digital humanities component of the course. This grant was extraordinarily valuable in supporting the creation of this course—working with archives can be more time consuming for instructors because of the preparation required before the semester begins, and this grant gave us time to prepare extensive supporting materials for this course. In this version of the course, students worked from high-resolution scans provided to us by the Richard L. D. and Marjorie J. Morse Department of Special Collections at Kansas State University, and they were also able to see the letters in person. We also organized a field trip to the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, KS, to see additional de Gaulle letters.

In the second iteration of the course, my initial plan was to use rare cookbooks, again from KSU special collections. However, due to a catastrophic library fire, I needed to find documents located outside of our university, relatively quickly. A WWI French soldier’s diary was recommended to me by special collections librarians at the National WWI Museum and Archive in Kansas City, and they provided high-resolution scans of the diary pages. They had received this diary as a gift, and did not have much information about its contents. Because of this, my students were able to discover interesting details about the diary that were not reflected in the archive initially. For example, the soldier numbered the notebooks of the diary in a way that made it seem like there was a missing second volume of the diary. However, we were able to determine that this was not the case (there were not missing diary entries between the first and “third” notebooks). Further, one of my students discovered that two of the diary pages were not included in the initial scan. The pages were not numbered, but he realized that there was a jump in the narrative of the text that we could not otherwise explain. When we reached out to the archive, they were able to confirm that they had missed these two pages in the scan, and provide us with the pages, thereby helping to ensure a complete and accurate digital record of the artifact.

Locating and selecting materials

Locating archival materials for translation courses is more challenging than selecting published literary texts to translate. In locating documents for my translation class, my preference was for documents with a local connection: in my experience, students respond well when they can connect their learning to themselves—in this case, through geography. Choosing local materials also means that students get the experience of visiting archives in person. For this reason, when seeking archival materials, I started with my university library, followed by local historical museums (which often hold letters or family diaries in languages other than English). I then reached out to area museums, archives, and historical societies, including presidential libraries. If these searches do not prove fruitful, there are numerous online repositories of materials including the Smithsonian, the Newberry Library, the Library of Congress, the Digital Library of the Caribbean, and university online archives such as those collected at FromThePage.

The criteria for selecting archival sources to translate might vary from class to class—I was looking for materials that would be high-interest (so not parish records or lists of names, for example), materials that had ideally not been translated or published before, and materials that were in a script that I found legible. In the case of French, universal schooling beginning in the 1870s, which taught both handwriting and spelling, means that a large number of documents written after this time are fairly legible. Students of German may find handwriting dating before 1941 difficult to read without special training. Handwriting also varies widely based on the writer, the condition of the document and, in the case of digitized documents, the quality of the scan.

My students struggled, at times, to decipher the soldier’s handwriting, especially as cursive script is no longer a standard part of US education. In my class, I worked with students to identify features of the particular handwriting in the diary that they found confusing (the number 9, the letter s). For my students, reading the handwriting got easier over time, which would suggest that choosing longer archival documents written by a single hand might work better for US students. It was also critical that I could generally decipher the handwriting in the diary and so could clear up any confusion. Reading and translating handwritten documents is substantially more challenging than reading or translating printed documents, and so this should be considered when thinking about how many words students should be asked to translate for a given class or project. In their final projects, my students only translated a handful of pages on their own, and only after I had carefully checked their transcriptions.

Addressing Challenges of Using Archival Materials

Using archival materials in a translation class presents additional challenges to the instructor. In terms of pedagogical and supplementary materials, translation textbooks are often focused toward either translating literary texts or toward translating legal, medical, or journalistic texts. Archival documents are likely to contain specialized vocabulary, with which students may not be familiar. In the case of older documents, this vocabulary might not be found in modern translation dictionaries. In terms of the documents themselves, students might struggle to decipher handwriting or idiosyncratic spelling or grammatical errors, which are natural in handwritten documents. Further, archival documents require additional historical contextualization, which language students might not be trained to research.

Addressing this challenge required a variety of resources. Pedagogically, I had students focus on basic translation techniques including transposition (changing the grammatical category of a word or group of words, such as a noun to a verb), modulation (changing the category of thought of a word or group of words, such as concrete to abstract), adaptation (adjusting a text due to a cultural difference between the source language and the target language, such as changing kilometers to miles), and equivalence (replacing a global message in the source text, such as an idiomatic expression) in their translation of the diary.^[3] This way they could see that, although the document they were translating was not similar to those in their textbook, the basic techniques they were learning were broadly applicable. In terms of vocabulary, I relied heavily on the help of university librarians, who were able to locate digital copies of military translation dictionaries from World War I, which were an invaluable resource for my students. Handwriting was tricky—I did find that students became more comfortable with the handwriting as the semester progressed. Students were also annoyed by spelling and grammatical errors—our soldier tended, for example, to mix up “et” and “est” which are pronounced the same way in French. I saw the students’ ability to identify and mentally correct these spelling errors as a feature, rather than a bug, as it encouraged them to think about these words in terms of sound as well as meaning. Using sound to transcribe words was invaluable when identifying place names from the diary, which our author tended to write phonetically (Caserne d’Anthouard, which our soldier had written as “Caserne Dantoir,” was a particularly tricky one for us, but the sense of accomplishment the students felt when they figured it out was amazing.)

Scaffolding

Using archival sources in a translation class requires additional scaffolding. I divided our task into three parts: transcription, translation, and annotation. For each part, I used an approach that encouraged increasing independence over the course of the semester. In the beginning of the semester, we transcribed, translated, and annotated pages from the diary as a whole class during class time, discussing decisions and techniques as we went along. Next, students transcribed, translated, and annotated a single passage for homework, then we compared the translations that they came up with and discussed how they got there, and where trouble areas had been. We worked together to create a single, definitive translation of the assigned passage. Next, in groups of three, students completed the full process—transcription, translation, and annotation—on longer passages, again working collaboratively to have a single, definitive translation of their group passages. Finally, students transcribed, translated and annotated passages independently.

When students are all working on the same text, as was the case with this diary, it is important to maintain a list of common terms and their translations. This can be accomplished via computer-assisted translation software such as Phrase TMS (formerly Memsource) or via a shared document where students track words and phrases with translations. In the case of the diary, we also used a shared Google Map with pins for place names. This allowed students to get a sense of the geographic area where the diary was taking place, and also to verify spellings of place names. Occasionally a student would misspell a place name, but putting the pin in the map helped them realize that the solider probably did not have lunch 200 kilometers away from where he slept that night.

This approach was not without pitfalls. Transcription, at least in our case, was fairly straightforward—when students had mistranscribed a word, this was a matter of error correction on my part. Translation has a lot more nuance—it can be reasonable to translate a single passage in multiple ways, and students tended to spend too long debating the difference between, for example, “I go quickly” and “I go speedily.” I was also not able to separate the tasks as much as might be ideal. With the transcription, I felt it was very important that students be working with an accurate transcription, so I made sure to check the transcriptions for accuracy before asking students to translate. However, there was not time in the class to separate translation and annotation in the same way—students needed to translate and annotate passages simultaneously. In a way, this works—if students spend time looking up the lingo for a specific artillery type, it makes sense to just create this footnote in the moment. For other annotations, such as for place names, with more time I would have encouraged students to do more research on those specific locations at the moment our text was written.

A final aspect of the task in this class was writing a translator’s preface to accompany the finished translation. To prepare this document, we looked at example translator’s prefaces, and identified a list of questions that a translator’s preface answers: (a) What is this specific text? Why is the text important? Why should English-language readers care about it? (b) What choices did you make as a translator? Are there broad decisions you made that impacted the translation as a whole? (c) What is the larger context of this work? What have other scholars said about this particular text, this author, this type of work, or this type of translation? One thing we focused on as a class was thinking about the audience of the preface. Specifically, this text is destined for people who read English and not the language of the source text. In addition to historical background on the text, these readers can benefit from cultural and linguistic positioning of the text that the translators are uniquely prepared to provide.

Rubrics and Learning Outcomes

When assessing these projects, I divided out tasks in the rubric. Below is a sample rubric for an archive translation project that requires transcription and annotation. As much as possible, these rubrics are developed from professional guidelines: the rubric for transcription, as well as the transcription style we used, is based on that of the National Archives. The rubric for the translation is adapted from the guidelines for assessing translation of the American Translators Association. For the annotation rubric, I was not able to identify professional standards for annotating primary sources. The Modern Languages Association provides resources for formatting notes, but their guidance discourages explanatory footnotes, which can be desirable in a translation of an archival source. To help students think through standards for annotation, we looked through examples of similar documents to see what terms were footnoted. We developed guidelines as a class, deciding that if the information you are putting in the footnote can be easily obtained from a dictionary or encyclopedia (is it Googleable?), then it does not need a footnote. Useful footnotes fell into three broad categories: historical, linguistic, and cultural. Historical footnotes provided information about the actions described in the diary, ideally within the context of the specific moment that the diary was written—places, names, types of artillery shells, the differences between French and British gas masks, etc. Linguistic footnotes clarified information about the language used in the diary, especially if this information might be interesting or useful to English-language readers of the diary—one fun example is the soldier’s “canned monkey” which was WWI-era slang for canned meat. Cultural footnotes provided clarification of cultural ideas or terms that might be obvious to French readers of the diary, but that would need explanation to audiences without deep knowledge of French culture—our soldier was a “chasseur à pied,” or a French infantry chasseur; these battalions have traditions and a deep cultural significance in France that need to be clarified for English readers.

Translation courses are common in language departments, and working on an archival translation project helped my students make progress toward a number of my department’s learning goals for French majors and MA students. In addition to improving their linguistic proficiency (a goal that would be met by any translation project), students also made progress toward more content-focused learning outcomes such as interpreting target-language texts; investigating and applying secondary sources of information in research and problem solving; and applying knowledge of the geography, culture, artistic and philosophical production, and history of regions where the target language is spoken in order to demonstrate critical consciousness. Because of the collaborative nature of these projects and because they are specifically grounded in professional skills and standards in the field, students also made progress toward learning outcomes about working in diverse and collaborative environments and professionalism. In my experience as a language instructor, our student learning outcome about professionalism can be one of the more difficult ones to reach and assess in advanced French courses: “Student demonstrates knowledge of professional and community opportunities for those with bilingual or multilingual skills.” Translation courses, especially where students work with archival documents, can be an ideal opportunity for them to think about professional skills and standards—not only those involved in text translation, but also those involved in working with archival sources.

Sample Rubric

Transcription

• Transcription is complete and follows the spelling, punctuation, and capitalization of the original. Illegible text and notes about other items that appear on the page are marked with brackets. Possible errors are noted using comments.
• Transcription is missing minor elements, or has not followed the spelling, punctuation, or capitalization of the original. Brackets and comments are not used consistently.
• Major elements missing from transcription/many major errors.
• Unacceptable.

 Annotation

• Footnotes are clearly written and provide additional information about key terms in the passage that would help Anglophone readers understand the historical, linguistic, or cultural context of the text. Notes are well-researched and situate the text in context.
• Footnotes of key terms are clearly written and show some evidence of additional research into the language/context of the text. Some terms that should be footnoted are not footnoted, or some footnotes are too superficial and do not provide enough additional context to be useful.
• Footnotes are difficult to read. Information provided in footnotes is not useful, and/or can easily be obtained from a simple search.
• Unacceptable.

Translation

Usefulness/transfer

• Translated text transfers meaning in a manner fully consistent with the translation instructions. Translation contains few or no transfer errors, and those present have a minor effect on meaning. Translated text contains few or no errors in target language mechanics.
• Translated text transfers meaning in a manner sufficiently consistent with the translation instructions. Translation contains occasional and/or minor transfer errors that slightly obscure or change meaning. Translated text contains occasional errors in target language mechanics.
• Translated text transfers meaning in a manner somewhat consistent with the translation instructions. Translation contains more than occasional transfer errors that obscure or change meaning. Translated text contains frequent and/or obvious errors in target language mechanics.
• Translated text transfers meaning in a manner inconsistent with instructions. Translation contains frequent and/or serious transfer errors that obscure or change meaning. Translated text contains excessive and/or disruptive errors in target language mechanics.

Idiomatic writing and terminology

• Translated text is almost entirely idiomatic and appropriate in context, contains few or no inappropriate term or style/register choices. Any errors have a minor effect on meaning.
• Translated text contains occasional unidiomatic or inappropriate wording or term and/or style/register choices. Such errors may slightly obscure meaning.
• Translated text contains frequent and/or obvious unidiomatic or inappropriate wording or term and/or style/register choices. Such errors may obscure or change meaning.
• Translated text contains excessive and/or disruptive unidiomatic or inappropriate and/or incorrect terms or style/register choices. Such errors obscure or change meaning.
• Incomplete.

Translator’s Preface

• Preface is interesting to read. Preface makes a case for why this translation is important and valuable to English-language audiences. Preface contextualizes the text or the translation in a wider context. Preface contains useful information about the approach to the translation that connects back to translation techniques used in class.
• Preface is interesting to read. Preface presents the text to English-language audiences, including some context. Preface discusses translation techniques.
• Preface presents the translated text. Preface contains some discussion of context or translation techniques.
• Preface is incomplete or inappropriate.

Conclusion

            Using archival materials presents challenges in a translation classroom, but I also noticed advantages to this approach. First, students immediately felt a sense of purpose when translating this diary—they wanted this soldier’s experiences to be accessible to more people, and they knew their work would facilitate this. This sense of purpose also led to a higher-quality end product: students felt a responsibility to produce the best, most accurate translation possible. In the case of the journal translation, it is also shared on the National WWI Museum and Memorial website, so students knew their translation would be accessible to a wide audience of researchers. Because I believe that students should choose whether or not they want their names attached to publicly accessible work, I let them decide how they wished to be acknowledged (if at all) on the public version of the translation. Those who chose to be included are listed as the translators in the archive, so their labor and contribution are visible to researchers.^[4] Second, because this work was genuinely new, students had the opportunity to present their translation to a variety of audiences, including the Kansas Military History Seminar and the Modern Languages Student Research Forum, Initials. Third, students gained additional valuable skills in this course, including working with handwritten documents. Fourth, students engaged in empathetic historical thinking that genuinely deepened their understanding of the First World War—seeing the soldier’s fingerprints in the ink of the pages of the diary, noticing how his handwriting changed when he was describing stressful or traumatic events, and noticing his shifts in tone and perspective as the diary progressed. The students gained a sense of authorship, voice, and experience that would have been, I think, much more difficult to achieve through translating a widely accessible published text.

Bibliography

Antonioli, Kathleen, and Melinda A. Cro. “Collaborative Perspectives on Translation and the Digital Humanities in the Advanced French Classroom.” French Review 91, no. 4 (May 2018): 130–45. 10.1353/tfr.2018.0240.

“Journal.” Object ID: 2014.34.1. The National WWI Museum and Memorial, Kansas City MO. https://collections.theworldwar.org/argus/final/Portal/Default.aspx?component=AAAS&record=9555a561-9814-4c64-b9fc-d4d5bd722df9, archived March 28, 2025, at https://web.archive.org/web/20250328154408/https://collections.theworldwar.org/argus/final/Portal/Default.aspx?component=AAAS&record=9555a561-9814-4c64-b9fc-d4d5bd722df9.

“Journal.” Object ID: 2014.34.2. The National WWI Museum and Memorial, Kansas City MO. https://collections.theworldwar.org/argus/final/Portal/Default.aspx?component=AAAS&record=99a05ef8-def4-4559-b4ad-e9d9d0b0f0d4, archived January 10, 2024, at https://web.archive.org/web/20240110200352/https://collections.theworldwar.org/argus/final/Portal/Default.aspx?component=AAAS&record=99a05ef8-def4-4559-b4ad-e9d9d0b0f0d4.

“The Freedom Papers.” Kansas State University Foundation. 9 May 2022. https://ksufoundation.org/impact/campus-impact/the-freedom-papers/, archived July 24, 2024, at https://web.archive.org/web/20240724153957/https://ksufoundation.org/impact/campus-impact/the-freedom-papers/.

Resources

American Translators Association: https://www.atanet.org/, archived July 24, 2024, at https://web.archive.org/web/20240724202927/https:/www.atanet.org/.

Digital Library of the Caribbean: https://www.dloc.com/, archived July 24, 2024, at https://web.archive.org/web/20240724113447/https://www.dloc.com/.

From the Page: https://fromthepage.com/, archived June 14, 2024, at https://web.archive.org/web/20240614024041/https:/fromthepage.com/landing.

Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/collections/, archived July 23, 2024, at https://web.archive.org/web/20240723150351/https:/www.loc.gov/collections/.

National Archives Citizen Archivist: https://www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist/get-started-transcribing, archived July 23, 2024, at https://web.archive.org/web/20240723151031/https:/www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist/get-started-transcribing.

National Archives Transcription Guide : https://www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist/transcribe/tips, archived July 23, 2024, at https://web.archive.org/web/20240723151149/https:/www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist/transcribe/tips.

Newberry Library: https://digcoll.newberry.org/#/, archived July 3, 2024, at https://web.archive.org/web/20240703031243/https:/collections.newberry.org/.

Phrase TMS: https://phrase.com/products/phrase-tms/, archived June 9, 2024, at https://web.archive.org/web/20240609065051/https:/phrase.com/platform/tms/.

Smithsonian Digital Volunteers: https://transcription.si.edu/, archived July 23, 2024, at https://web.archive.org/web/20240723115412/https:/transcription.si.edu/.

Endnotes

[1] This class was co-taught with Dr. Melinda A. Cro, and we developed the scaffolding of assignments and many of the rubrics together. For more information about this class, see Antonioli, Kathleen, and Melinda A. Cro. “Collaborative Perspectives on Translation and the Digital Humanities in the Advanced French Classroom.” French Review 91, no. 4 (May 2018): 130–45. 10.1353/tfr.2018.0240 and “The Freedom Papers.” Kansas State University Foundation. 9 May 2022. https://ksufoundation.org/impact/campus-impact/the-freedom-papers/.

[2] “Journal.” Object ID: 2014.34.1. The National WWI Museum and Memorial, Kansas City MO. https://collections.theworldwar.org/argus/final/Portal/Default.aspx?component=AAAS&record=9555a561-9814-4c64-b9fc-d4d5bd722df9.  “Journal.” Object ID: 2014.34.2. The National WWI Museum and Memorial, Kansas City MO. https://collections.theworldwar.org/argus/final/Portal/Default.aspx?component=AAAS&record=99a05ef8-def4-4559-b4ad-e9d9d0b0f0d4.

[3] We used Michele H. Jones, The Beginning Translator’s Workbook or The ABCs of French to English Translation: Revised Edition (University Press of America: 2014) as the textbook for this course.

[4] My students were not paid for their contribution to the archive, which may be a consideration for some instructors, as students are providing skilled labor.