[Tipp/Hinweis] Transkribus

[JSongSun]

Has anyone had success using Transkribus to transcribe and translate Kurrentschrift from old church records.

[TempusFugit]

I've looked at it when the church records for my area went online, but I'd say it's not that useful for it. In church records, you have a lot of different writers, and for Transkribus you need 20-30 pages to train a custom OCR model because every handwriting is different. But if I have to retrain it every few pages, it's wasted time. You might as well use something like Tesseract for OCR. There's also eScriptorium, but that has quite an overhead if you want to install it yourself, instead of using their service.

For a test, I dropped a random scan from the online published church record of my region into it and let it do its job: more than 90% of the resulting text was unreadable total junk. Some words kinda made sense, but pretty much none of it was literally correct transcribed. You still would need to be able to read Kurrent to correct this mess.

I think where Transkribus works is when you have books with lots of pages which were written by professional writers. Like those created by monks with hundreds of cleanly written text.

[JSongSun]

Hello. Your experience with Transkribus sounds identical to mine. I do not know Kurrentschrift, German or Bairische, but I can at least identify the family name and some of the given names. After many hours of scouring the Rettenbach/Schmalzgrub Catholic church records on Matricula, I have compiled a list of about thirty entries for Schuss. Now the task is to determine which are my direct relatives. Thank you for your reply!
Sincerely,
James

[Ruhen]

It actually worked quite well for me. I translated a part myself and checked it with Transkribius. Sometimes he was able to translate a word that made sense and I was able to read the sentence correctly. So as an aid it's not bad in my opinion. But it really depends on the quality of the texts.

[JSongSun]

I suspected I would need to transcribe what I am able to manually, then use that to "train" Transkribus. I am doing my best to transcribe and translate the Latin in these old church records, but a general web search and Google Translate are proving to be of limited use. I will look to Latin abbreviation (Cappelli via University of Zurich), genproxy.co.uk/Latin, Tufts University Latin Dictionary and FamilySearch.org Latin word list as further sources. This sounds like a mountain of work, but I feel the details are the flesh that cover the bones of names and dates.
Thanks for your reply!

[gki]

James, there is really no reason to not use the Lesehilfe forum. People are usually glad to help. It is helpful to indicate parish and bishopric in the title since people ( at lease myself) prefer to help in areas that they are more familiar with and have more expertise.

[JSongSun]

Thank you for the gentle guidance. I am somewhat clumsily learning to navigate my way through.
Regards,
J