This semester, the one course I'm taking is a research seminar. Thanks to the prevailing conditions of the world, I must attempt to research and write a 25-page paper on a topic pertaining to military history without physical access to archival materials. Better still, due to bureaucratic fallout from previous plague semesters, I can't check anything out from the University's library through inter-library loan, either. I must therefore rely on whatever I can scrape up online, and any physical books I might happen to buy along the way.

I've already fallen behind the course timetable, partly because said timetable is almost completely opposite from the way I normally work (more on this in a moment), but mostly because I've already had to scrap one topic for lack of available sources. I originally wanted to do something on the Alsos mission, which was an intelligence operation run by the Manhattan Engineer District in 1944. This was a fascinating piece of work, in which a team of scientists and intelligence operatives followed the Allied forces into Europe on the heels of the Normandy invasion--literally following them, usually entering towns in France and western Germany just hours after they were secured by Allied ground forces--to round up as many French and German nuclear scientists as they could find and at last answer the question that had plagued everyone involved with the Manhattan Project since its inception: How close were the Germans to developing an atomic bomb?

(Spoiler: Not very. Far, far less than everyone on our side had been assuming they were all along, in fact.)

Anyway, I had to drop that fascinating topic because I couldn't scrounge up any primary sources. (For those not familiar with the jargon, a primary source in history is something, usually a document, that was directly related to the events being examined. Correspondence of people involved in historical events, records kept by organizations, contemporary news accounts, diaries--that kind of thing. Scholarly works written about events after the fact are "secondary sources" in this system of thought.) Everything I got a line on would have required a personal visit to some archive or another (e.g., the papers of General Leslie R. Groves, the military head of the Manhattan Engineer District, are in the Library of Congress), which I wouldn't really have time or budget to do even if that kind of thing were physically possible right now.

So I had to scrap that idea, which put me behind the eight-ball. For a couple of days there, I thought I had come up with a winner of a replacement, though. From the fall of 1944 to the late spring of 1946, the U.S. Army operated a network of prisoner-of-war camps in Maine, housing nearly 4,000 German prisoners, mostly Afrika Korps members captured in North Africa. They were here to fill a critical labor shortage in the state's agriculture and forestry industries, since a great many Mainers who had worked in those industries before the war either was drafted, or buggered off to, e.g., Connecticut to make way more money working at Pratt & Whitney than they ever could've picking potatoes and cutting trees.

As it happens, after the camps were closed in 1946, the Army donated a nearly complete run of the Houlton camp's newspaper, which was written and edited by prisoners for prisoners, to the University of Maine's library. They've been scanned and made available as part of the library's Digital Commons project, and they are primo primary source materials. It doesn't get any more primary. And there they all are, just waiting to be picked up and mined for buried treasure.

Only one problem:

They're in German.

Now, I can speak and read a little German. I took two semesters of it as an undergraduate, and I've picked up bits and pieces here and there over many years of being interested in and reading about the Second World War. Over the last couple of days, I have determined that this means I know just enough to be reasonably sure that the camp newspapers are, in fact, an absolute gold mine...

... but not enough to get out any of the gold.

So, I did what any red-blooded 21st-century scholar would do and ran a few of them through Google Translate. Google Translate is pretty good at rendering some languages into intelligible written English--the romance languages, for example, usually come out OK. Japanese, on the other hand, is rendered as almost complete gibberish.

German is... somewhere in between. The gist is there, but not in a form that would be at all credible as a quoted scholarly source. So that's not going to work.

There are commercial translation services out there, of course, and I've hit a couple of them up for quotes, but they always have the kind of website that won't even give you a ballpark figure for what anything might cost or how long it might take. The only one that gave any kind of a cost estimate said they tend to run about $0.10 a word for academic work.

All told, there are 352 pages of these newspapers, once you leave out the special issue that's just a reprint of the 1919 Weimar constitution (which I don't really need, and which has presumably already been published in English elsewhere). Some are cartoons, crossword puzzles, and other stuff that doesn't need translating, but that's still a lot of densely typed German. Acrobat doesn't do word counts, so I tried dumping the combined file of all the issues to plain text and measuring that.

It came out to 150,000+ words, which is probably wildly inflated by the fact that the OCR scattered syllables everywhere in a lot of places, but still. If that's anything close to accurate, that would be $15,000.

So if the quotes I get back from any of these services are anything like that, that's sure as hell not happening.

Compounding my woes is the aforementioned course structure, which, because we're supposed to be peer-reviewing each other's work and it all has to be kept to some kind of schedule, calls for a research and writing process that is almost completely at odds with how I work. Thursday before last, topics had to be selected. Last Thursday we had to submit a bibliography. This Thursday we're on the hook for a prospectus explaining our thesis and methodology, with an outline no less, and two weeks after that--April 1, as it happens--we have to hand in a completed rough draft.

I do my bibliographies at the end, with the references I've already used stacked up around me. I've never written a prospectus, because I don't know what my thesis and methodology will be so early in the process. I haven't written an outline or a rough draft of an academic paper since high school. I do the reading first and then... just start writing, letting the material be my guide, and it works out in the end. Only this time it wouldn't, because even if I finished the paper on time, I'd have missed all those other stops along the line and would already have sunk my grade.

I'm not unsympathetic to the professor's motivation here, I understand exactly why he reckons it needs to get done this way, but jeez. If you set out with the specific intent of coming up with a paper-writing process that fucks with me at every step, you could not do better than the way this course is set up.

Add that to the fact that I have this tantalizing pile of beautifully promising but virtually inaccessible primary material sitting here, most of my secondary sources are still somewhere in the UPS system, and I have three days to come up with a document that convincingly pretends I already know how I'm going to do any of this, followed by two weeks to write the paper even though the semester's only half-over, and I am just the tiniest bit stressed about all this shit.

(Oh yeah, the fridge and the UTI happened while I was trying and failing to get anywhere on the Alsos paper, too. And I just found out about the Maine CDC's decision to fuck over an entire demographic I happen to be in, as well. That should probably be a separate rant.)

If you've stuck with me this far, and I can't blame you if you haven't, do you know anyone who can read German and would like to try translating 300-odd pages of typewritten material from the mid-1940s for somewhat less than $15,000?* Preferably in, like... a week? I have no idea how insane that is as a timetable, but I'm guessing very.

Fuuuuck.

--G.
* I mean I wouldn't expect it for free, but I also can't come up with more than a hundo or two, I had to buy a refrigerator the other week
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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