Letitia Wigington

Fat Abe · 03-27-2010, 11:05 PM

I'd like to get a good, clean modern translation of this work (The Confession and Execution of Letitia Wigington of Ratclif):

http://www.munseys.com/book/9991/CON...f_Ratclif,_THE

Here is an interesting excerpt:

"... therefore people have been very cruel to me in giving our such gross Lies of me, as to say, that I lay with John Sadler, and that I was a Whore to other before: and upon no other grounds, but only by reason I did plead my Belly, which thing I was advised to, ..."

Many of the existing OCR conversions of the original printed confession read Whore as VVhore, which may be appropriate to the time. However, these OCR programs seem to include rules for converting "her felf" to "her self". Olde (sic) English rules. There are other oddities like "but but". How much liberty does the proofreader have in correcting such mishaps? Is there even a handwritten confession in existence? Doubtful.

Google has an image of only the first page of the confession:

http://books.google.com/books?id=Fjz...ington&f=false

Help.

charleski · 03-30-2010, 11:47 PM

I can't help you with the text, but the old-style long-s which looks like an f without a full cross-bar is very definitely an 's' (think of it as a long thin variant of the modern s-shape) and rendering it as a modern 'f' would be a silly error. 'W' may have evolved from 'VV', but the evolution was long complete by the 17th century so again the modern form should be used. If the source text has odd grammatical constructions or seemingly spurious words then it's best to leave them as-is, since altering those moves one from the realm of transliteration into a full translation.

03-27-2010, 11:05 PM	#1
Fat Abe Man Who Stares at Books Posts: 1,824 Karma: 10606722 Join Date: Mar 2010 Location: 50th State, USA. Also, PA, NY, CA, and elsewhere. Device: All of the Above	Letitia Wigington I'd like to get a good, clean modern translation of this work (The Confession and Execution of Letitia Wigington of Ratclif): http://www.munseys.com/book/9991/CON...f_Ratclif,_THE Here is an interesting excerpt: "... therefore people have been very cruel to me in giving our such gross Lies of me, as to say, that I lay with John Sadler, and that I was a Whore to other before: and upon no other grounds, but only by reason I did plead my Belly, which thing I was advised to, ..." Many of the existing OCR conversions of the original printed confession read Whore as VVhore, which may be appropriate to the time. However, these OCR programs seem to include rules for converting "her felf" to "her self". Olde (sic) English rules. There are other oddities like "but but". How much liberty does the proofreader have in correcting such mishaps? Is there even a handwritten confession in existence? Doubtful. Google has an image of only the first page of the confession: http://books.google.com/books?id=Fjz...ington&f=false Help.

03-30-2010, 11:47 PM	#2
charleski Wizard Posts: 1,196 Karma: 1281258 Join Date: Sep 2009 Device: PRS-505	I can't help you with the text, but the old-style long-s which looks like an f without a full cross-bar is very definitely an 's' (think of it as a long thin variant of the modern s-shape) and rendering it as a modern 'f' would be a silly error. 'W' may have evolved from 'VV', but the evolution was long complete by the 17th century so again the modern form should be used. If the source text has odd grammatical constructions or seemingly spurious words then it's best to leave them as-is, since altering those moves one from the realm of transliteration into a full translation.

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