Many translators immediately refused to cooperate when they found out that the texts were manuscripts. It is a job that requires frequent consultations and source research, which greatly prolongs the translation process.
The collaborators with "difficult" to decipher handwriting included, among others, Rachel Auerbach and Hersz Wasser, who - as Magdalena Siek says - additionally used various abbreviations, periods, lines, dashes, which nobody knew what they meant. Rabbi Szapira's notes to the texts of his pre-war textbooks prepared by the scribe were also a huge challenge. They required above-average knowledge of the language. Marta Dudzik-Rudkowska has no doubt: it was not a task for a Polish scientist, but for someone for whom Hebrew was the first language (the edition was prepared by Daniel Reiser).
When translating German manuscripts - as Piotr Kendziorek, PhD underlines - the biggest problem was the traditional German-style calligraphy taught in schools before the war, where the shape of the letters entirely differs from that of today. Tadeusz Epsztein points to one more difficulty: when reading manuscripts, in many cases the identification of the handwriting was an additional element. Based on the language and style, the translator tried to figure out whether it was a text written by a given person.
Contribution to multilingualism, which complicates the task of the translator
The project involved translating over 35,000 pages of documents on a broad range of subjects: accounts, journals, memoirs and testaments, official documents, statistical statements, scientific studies, literary works (including poetry), the Warsaw Ghetto press and press releases, religious writings, notes, reports, posters, leaflets, letters, personal documents, questionnaires and others. Each text required a translator to face different types of challenges. Marek Tuszewicki, PhD, among others, says: The translation of literary texts is stylistically different from documents. I perceive and relive such works differently. Literary texts raise the question of the presence of elements of art and an attempt to convey not only the content but also the artistic shape of what has been written. The translation of historical testimonies that are not as strongly accumulated emotions as in fine literature is the work of a documentalist and archivist who translates certain pages of history and makes them readable to the recipient. In this context, I see myself more as a curator than a translator of literature.
The Archive also comprises various styles - from colloquial speech to specialist scientific and religious texts. The translation of such texts requires combining numerous competences, not just linguistic but also comprehensive consultations and source research. The translation of Peretz Opoczno's reportages, in which the author used dialectal phrases, jargon or the language of the underworld, was a major translation challenge. Monika Polit admits that her consultants were language teachers and people who were raised in the language - currently, they are people at a very advanced age - but they could not be of much help either, as they were not familiar with the style. Naturally, not everyone understands prison or smuggling jargon.
Languages in the Ringelblum Archive also appear in a comic role. To understand it, you need to know the reality of a confined district. Agnieszka Żółkiewska explains: An interesting language experience was the struggle with folklore texts. The degree of difficulty in translation, in this case, was very high because of the various wordplay, quibbles that appeared in these texts, and also because of the very strong references to Jewish religious literature and pre-war reality. It could be said that the borderline between the world before and in the ghetto was very thin at the time, which required intensive research and understanding of the context of jokes, riddles and anecdotes that appeared therein.
As Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov observes, the texts in the Archive were often written by ordinary people, the same way as they spoke. It never occurred to them that one day it would be read by someone who spoke a different language, unfamiliar with specific vocabulary or jargon typical for a given field or place of residence. In such a situation, it is necessary to support translators who understand the colloquial language. Sara Arm and Ruta Sakowska who were raised in the Yiddish culture, have done a lot of work on such texts and were able to grasp various linguistic nuances.
One thing that undoubtedly facilitated the work of translating the literary works included in the 26th volume, particularly in the case of Yiddish texts, was the closeness of the language to Polish," says Agnieszka Żółkiewska, PhD. In the texts of Ringelblum's younger collaborators and writers, the Polish language appears very often, in unexpected places and forms - mainly as neologisms.