Appeal for Yiddish speakers to help translate UK and USA archives
A new crowdsourcing project to find Yiddish speakers to help translate archive material has been launched by the Modern Records Centre (MRC) at the University of Warwick.
The MRC is working with the Kheel Center at Cornell University to ask members of the Yiddish-speaking community in the UK and USA for help in translating more than 1,500 digitised pages of journals and newspapers from late 19th century and early 20th century.
The archive of newspapers held at the MRC are from the East End of London and were written for Eastern European Yiddish speaking immigrants. They include The Polish Yidel and Hashulamith newspapers which form part of the archives of Aaron Rollin, an active member of the Amalgamated Jewish Tailors', Machinists' and Pressers' Trade Union and the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers.
The Kheel Center pages are from the The Ladies’ Garment Worker, journal of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union and cover the period 1910-1918.
Helen Ford is Archives Manager at the University of Warwick’s MRC. She said: “This is an exciting project and the intention is to add more pages from both archives in the future and build a useful resource for Jewish history on both sides of the Atlantic. Translating the Yiddish text will allow non Yiddish speaking researchers to explore previously inaccessible materials.”
The joint website is part of a collaborative project to explore the links between the two archives and will hopefully lead to further projects in the future.
For more information visit http://transcribe.lib.warwick.ac.uk/yt/index.php/Main_Page
Notes to editors
Images from the archives are available here:
First edition of the Polish Yidel, July 1884
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/communications/medialibrary/images/september2012/polish_yidel.jpg
A notice to join the Amalgamated Society of Tailors (Jewish branch), 1889
Front page of ‘The Workers’ Friend’, July 1916.
For more information, please contact Kelly Parkes-Harrison, Press and Communications Manager, University of Warwick, k.e.parkes@warwick.ac.uk, +44 (0)2476 150868, +44 (0) 7824 540863