A New Flying Machine; An excursion into historic foreign literature, or how I learned about pioneering aviators

As part of my research on Irving M. Davidson’s participation in Israel Ludlow’s kite experiment of December 1905, I came across an article with a nice picture published in 1906. As the article (which I purchased through eBay) did not have an apparent English translation, I decided to see what I could translate. My education in foreign languages extends only to modern French and ancient Greek (and some conversational Spanish). I decided to see what I could accomplish by using Google’s translate function (https://translate.google.com). I was aware that German had its accent marks, but I also had to give myself a crash course in German orthography. So, I learned what appeared as a slightly off “t” was really a “k,” or what I thought were “ss” was actually a “p.” The word processing program (Microsoft Word) included symbols with letters with the appropriate accent marks (particularly vowels with umlauts), which had to be inserted each time they appeared. Given that the article was approximately 850 words, the effort took less than five hours of working with the translating service.

The real challenge was checking the translation as multiple English words may apply to a specific German word. For example, while we are familiar with Führer as leader, it has other meanings. One possible meaning is pilot, and that term was used as the most appropriate for the context of the discussion. I do know that nouns are written with a capital letter, and I learned that the possessive or adjectival form of a noun may include a suffix. I started out copying whole sentences, checking for the sensibility of the translation. Aviation has its technical terms that must be accounted for across language barriers. After addressing typographical errors and finding alternative words (again, dealing with orthography), I later input whole paragraphs. The effect tended to change the context of the translation subtly. When I was satisfied with the new translation, I inputted the entire monograph to the translator. While I am impressed with the results, I by no means claim to be fluent in German. Anyone who knows German . . .