Quick, Look Polish!

Many, many, MANY years ago my sister came to visit and brought with her a couple of photo albums crammed full of stuff (she is the family historian, you see).

One of the items in the album was an old letter from one of our relatives to another.  It is sloppy, in cursive, and written in Polish - a language I don’t have a clue about.  Additionally, there were almost no clear indicators where the letter began or ended and I had no real context for what the letter could possibly contain.

I was curious enough to start putting pieces and parts into Google Translate. 

It was an entertaining couple of hours to get to the level of translation I show below and it is still pretty gibberish-y.  Whenever I saw I had obvious errors, like when the translator came back with “the nose is a lake” (I’m not kidding), I went back and tweaked what I thought I could make out of the cursive - sometimes it helped. 

I also learned that it is critical with a capital “C” that one understands that the “=“ means “continued on next line”.  I won’t get into the utterly tasteless mistranslation I ran into before I figured that out other than it made me think “Yikes!  This letter has taken a horrifying turn all of a sudden…”  I try to keep things clean-ish here at The 36th Lock.

In some cases I had to throw up my hands and just leave those words untranslated (those are the words in all caps).

Here is what I can make of the Polish:

list pisany dnia 18 listopada 1950 roku odzywam sie do ciebie kochany synu

Niech będzie Pochwalony Jezus Chrystu

list od ciebie odebrać za ktory ci dziekuje from sie dowie dzieci o twoim zdrowiu i powodzeniu a ja jestem zdrowy a powodzenie

moje jak zwykle i u nas sniegu 

zimna wcale i fajny czas

dotyk czas a dalej to nie wiadomo a od nas to duzo CHTOPOKOW

wzieli do wojska ale i nas to jeszcze dobrze

celka dziękówa dostata CHTOPOKA 

w tamten niedziele byty chrzciny i chamka

MANKOWA się oczy nieca znanego domu

i bryta na weselu i dotyk czas to ludzie zarabiają choc drogo bo funt mięsa kosztu je dolara i wicej

ci NIMOM co pisae tylko cie pozdrawiam kochany synu i zone i dzieci twoja matka

And here is the English according to Google Translate

a letter written on 18 November 1950 talk to you dear son 

May Jesus Christ be praised 

receive a letter from you for who you thank you from the children finds out about your health and success and I'm healthy and successful 

Me, as usual, and with us the snow 

cold and cool all the time 

touch time and further it does not know a lot of us CHTOPOKOW 

they took the army but we are still not well 

Thanked cell is insufficiently CHTOPOKA 

in that Sunday entities baptisms and low peasant 

MANKOWA eyes less than a well-known home 

and in abundance at the wedding and feel the time is people earn though expensive because a pound of meat cost them a dollar and more 

NIMOM you what to write only greet you dear son and wife and children, your mother

————-

Meh… Not great, but I think that’s the best I can do.  I have reviewed project proposals that were less elegantly worded than this translation, though, so I’m gonna call this one a victory (my bar is set really low) and move on.