I took a few semesters of German in college and can read it with some effort, but if I'm to go to Germany to visit my grandfather's family I have to be able to speak it better. I've requested copies of the books my great-grandmother wrote and want to begin by reading and translating them. (They are so old they were printed in a blackletter font.)
Unfortunately a friend "borrowed" my Worterbuch and promptly lost it, so my good dictionary is gone. Can anyone recommend a good, thorough, German-English dictionary? And any other contemporary German language resources?

Sounds like a lot of work German translating a whole book but you also get to brush up on your German. You might find the Oxford-Duden German Dictionary (ISBN: 0199545685) to be of help.

And if you have a scanner and a OCR software you can scan the book and then use the OCR software to turn the character images into editable text. Then copy and paste the text onto one of the freely available online translator such as Babel Fish or Google translator. To further speed up your translation you can take the editable text and place it into a webpage then use Babel Fish to translator the whole webpage. After using these online translator you will probably still have to check and correct the translation but using these online translators might speed up your translation project.

You really think OCR software can handle a blackletter font? I'll have to look into it, it would be great if that could work. I'm not looking forward to deciphering that old gothic style. I wanted to scan them anyway as those books are getting OLD and should be passed down as part of the family history.

I did a search and found this software ABBYY FineReader XIX that says it can ocr blackletter but the price is ridiculously expensive but they do have a free trial that limit you to 50 free pages of ocr.

Thanks George, now that I know the software exists I'll ask around and see if there's any way this can be done on the cheap. I know some college librarians, maybe one will know.

Welcome Soliloquy. I tried OCRing a page containing blackletter using OmniPage 16 and the results were less than perfect so hopefully ABBYY FineReader XIX has better results.

George, do you have access to an Oxford Duden German dictionary? I looked it up on Amazon, and though it looks like a fantastic resource, I'm a bit concerned that one of the reviews said it "contained the changes since the Rechtschreibreform". Does that mean it only has the new spellings, or does it have the new in addition to the old?

lived in berlin for 17 years and can help with a little bit of german

Ich habe in berlin gewohnt fur seibzehn jahre und Ich konnte sie helfen mit ein biosschen deutsche


bye

andy

andyg1968@yahoo.com