Napoleon Series Archive 2007

Re: Calling All Authors - Aspiring Or Established!

I began searching your Forum today. The discussion of the Swiss, the "battery" and language caught my eye.

Seems I should add some comments on Huningue, language and a translation "trick".

First, living in Basel, Switzerland, the post about the Bruderholz pleased me as I live on the Oberer Batterieweg 200 meter from the battery and, while a wonderful park the community lauches the New Year's and 1st of August fireworks from the battery), the site lies too far away for direct use in the sieges of Huningue in 1814 or 1815.

Second, it seems everyone realized that the two sieges received little English-language ink over the years (although I found a reference to Colonel Chancel on the web listing for "The Fall of Napoleon"). Colonel Chancel's defense results in rather more attention from the French. Nevertheless, the greatest number of accounts are in German, includind a Bavarian one (Heydenreich, Theodor. "Die Belgerung von Hüningen von 22. Dezbr. 1813 bis 16. April 1814" in Darstellungen aus der Bayerischen Kriegs- und Heeresgeschichte, Heft 10. K. B. Kriegsarchiv: München, 1901). As for the Swiss, there are several works on the Swiss military (including Maag's works for the Napoleonic period), they to focus more on the path to neutrality. I guess you all know the Congress of Vienna required the dismantlement of the fortress of Huningue (Hüningen in German), although the outlines of the walls can still be seen in the streets of the town (it helps to have a plan of the original fortress to visualize it completely).

On the language front, my living and working in Switzerland since 1990 gave an experience in multiple languages that honed the German and French from my school days. Being with a multinational company, the "default language" has become English although the "everyone in their own language" was the norm when I arrived.

With that background, for "quickie" translations online, try the Prompt site. While one can do sentences and paragraphs, as always, it pays to know something about the language as it gives generic versions and fails to perform translations from a military perspecive ("corps" flips to "body" and "bouche de feu" becomes "mouth of fire"). This said, it has the advantage of providing a small "keyboard" with all the special characters (even the cryllic - my college Russian being rusty, it helps with getting the cryllic-character spelling for on-line searches.

On Google, using the "view plain text" button I recommend using "view page image" to seen the exact page. Then you can copy the text into the translator and copy out the translated text. All the previous warnings apply, though, as well as knowing the "special letters" (here the keyboard helps as the Google OCR does not work on ä, ö, ü, é, è, à, â, etc - nor does it pick up German Gothic or Russian cryllic text for that matter).

Anyway, try this "trick" to get your project moving along. - R

PS - Oh, yes. Like Huningue/Hüningen, it helps to know the different names of towns in multiple languages; example: Basel (German), Basle (English - until the city voted to change it to "Basel" a few years back), Bâle (French) or Basilea (Italian). Then, as Prince de Neuchâtel, Berthier is rarely referred to as the Prinz von Neuenberg. - R

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Calling All Authors - Aspiring Or Established!
Please do not be discouraged
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My limited experiences.
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Thanking You...
Blimey! They Did Invade France!
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Translation software
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Re: Translation software *LINK*
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