THE SOMMER FAMILY FONDS:
LETTERS PROVIDE AN OPPORTUNITY TO ENGAGE WITH THE PAST
Looking for opportunities to collaborate with Waterloo professors this past fall, Nick Richbell, head of Special Collections & Archives (SCA), connected with Grit Liebscher, professor of applied linguistics in Germanic and Slavic Studies, and her multilingualism seminar class to transcribe and translate letters from the Sommer Family fonds. The Sommers were a local Georgetown family who immigrated to Canada from Germany in 1954.
Professor Liebscher, who first worked with the fonds a few years ago, knew collaborating on a project using the letters would provide an added layer of personal perspective to the subjects covered in the seminar – trans – and multilingualism, translation, as well as the linguistic and cultural effects of migration. She adds, “Students often describe the transcription and translation process as a ‘puzzle’ and I like that metaphor because it adds a lot of excitement and room for creativity as well as fun, which is always a good aspect of any learning activity.”
“Students often describe the transcription and translation process as a ‘puzzle’ and I like that metaphor because it adds a lot of excitement and room for creativity as well as fun, which is always a good aspect of any learning activity.”
To kick off the project, Richbell met with the class to introduce archival work to students, none of whom had engaged with an archival collection before, discussing how and why things are collected for the future and how SCA organizes and stores archival items. From there, students broke into pairs to transcribe and translate three letters. Working through legibility issues and words with no direct translation, and determining intent from the tone of the letter, students presented their completed translations to the class and discussed their process.
Working with archives not only gives students hands-on experience, but also provides an opportunity for their work to live on: the translated letters completed during the course will be added to the Archives Database. And the work continues. SCA has directed funding for two Intercultural German Studies students to continue transcribing and translating the Sommer family letters so future scholars can more easily discover firsthand the experiences of new Canadians from the past.
Our work on the Sommer letters allowed us to conduct our very own case study and observe first-hand how written language use changes after migrating to another country. What makes the Sommer Family Fonds particularly valuable for this kind of research is that one is dealing with multiple decades of chronologically coherent letter exchanges ... Not only do the letters thus lend themselves to diachronic studies, they also serve as a time capsule, preserving the family members’ handwriting.