Transcribe Old German Scripts with Transkribus
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Transkribus reads Kurrent, Sütterlin and modern handwriting for you.
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How Transkribus helps you to translate Kurrent, Sütterlin, Fraktur or Antiqua to text
Decipher old German Handwritings with AI-powered Text Recognition
Automatically recognize your historical documents and turn them into normal text. Transkribus helps you to convert Kurrent, Sütterlin and Fraktur Script from the from the 15th to 20 century. There are a number of publicly available artificial intelligence models you can use.
Manually transcribe and correct automatic translations
With the transcription editor you can manually transcribe your old German Scripts or you can correct transcription errors from the automatic transcription. The results of the automatic transcription can vary depending on the handwriting and the quality of the material.
Train your own AI text recognition models
You can also train specific text recognition models that are capable of recognising exactly the old German Script and the handwriting of your material
Search your old documents
With Transkribus you can search your documents for names and keyowords and you have also more advanced search options
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How Transkribus works
Transkribus is a software that uses artificial intelligence to “learn” how to read Kurrent Script. For this, the software first needed to be trained with a number of pages that have been manually transcribed. This so called “Ground Truth” enables Transkribus to understand and read Kurrent Script.
The model “German Giant” for instance was trained with more than 15 Million words from many different handwritings. You can use this and other pretrained AI models to automatically recognize your Kurrent, Sütterlin or Fraktur documents and convert them into normal text.
If you are able and willing to transcribe about 50 pages by yourself, you can also train a custom AI model. Your own model is then able recognize excactly the handwriting that you are working with.
About old German Scripts
There are a number of old German Scripts that were used in the German speaking World between the 16th and 20th century. On the one hand, there were a number of handwritings including Kurrent Script, Sütterlin, Offenbacher Script. But there were also some printed Scripts such as Fraktur or Antiqua.
With the help of Transkribus accessing and searching a large number of historical documents – written in old German Scripts – is today possible. By using one of the public models or a own model, thousands of historical documents can be automatically converted into text.
