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Objectives - Services

Objectives

The objective of the RE-TRANSCRIPRO association is to establish scholarships through the creation of expert transcription centers, while maintaining a fair-trade ethic. The association manages an efficient collaboration between qualified personnel in Europe and teams of partners in emerging countries (currently in southern and south-eastern Asia), based on expertise shared among the members of the association in the area of processing patrimonial documents printed in early languages, or those that have outdated or hard-to-read characters.

RE-TRANSCRIPRO manages transcription centers that scan antiquarian documents, using the most recent methods available to accomplish this particularly difficult task. If 90% of the characters appearing in documents of this nature may be scanned relatively easily, the remaining 10% is very difficult to recognize by standard methods, which in turn raises the cost of transcription as it requires verification by highly-trained personnel.
The members of RE-TranscriPro help sustain the association by giving their support, either by donating their scientific capacities (linguistic and historic knowledge, computer support) or by doing research and helping set up collaborations and partnerships. They help the association offer products and services of a very high quality (99.95% accuracy, guaranteed by contract, whereas standard OCR programs can only provide 90% accuracy at the very best) and practice fair pricing, respecting the ethic of fair trade.
Thus, the partners who produce the transcriptions obtain better remuneration for their work, benefitting from the possibilities of bridge loans. Price negotiation includes production costs as well as environmental and social costs. The high level of quality obtained by the association allows it to offer competitive prices.

Services offered

Expert transcriptions of patrimonial documents written in: middle French, pre-Classical French, Classical Latin, Medieval Latin, Neo-Latin, texts from the 15th to 18th centuries, Gothic characters, Latin characters (transcription of Asian characters is being developed).

Methods

Transcription is not done directly, by manually entering text and comparing it with the original documents, which is only an imperfect solution to the problem of unrecognizable characters. Transcribers still confuse the long S with an F, or they may read the R as a T, stylized letters which occur in most of the documents printed in Latin characters between the invention of the printing press and the beginning of industrial printing (at the end of the 18th century). The method of transcription is chosen according to the type of document and the quality of the images :
- by direct transcription, corrected by appropriate linguistic tools; or
- by the use of Optical Character Recognition programs developed for modern-day characters, then corrected afterwards using specialized linguistic tools.

The transcription partners:

  1. are personnel taught by the association, paid according to the principles of fair trade
  2. are specialized in the fonts of patrimonial documents, the use of specialized OCR programs, various post-processing methods, at the first level of verification.

The verifying personnel and the teaching personnel:

  1. are members of RE-TranscriPro or paid by the association, educated at university level and have experience with patrimonial documents, OCR and word-processing software;
  2. intervene during the education of the transcription partners, during quality control and supervise the verification procedures.

RE-TRANSCRIPRO proposes several levels of text processing :

  1. Diplomatic transcription (unicode characters) by the mile, without formatting, with a preliminary verification done by the association on-site, with automated linguistic tools;
  2. Transcription with formatting, respecting the layout of the original document, with identical text line by line, transcription of all of the printed elements (headers, advertisements, signatures) and a more thorough, manual verification;
  3. XML-TEI encoding according to a proposed standard model, adaptable to the demands of the user;
  4. Transformation from the diplomatic transcription that strictly conforms to the original (i, j, u, v, ligatures, abbreviations) into a slightly modernized version (i and j, u and v modernized, ligatures and abbreviations lengthened);
  5. Direct transcription into a slightly modernized version (French, Latin), without a diplomatic version;
  6. Direct transcription into modern orthography (French, Latin).

Available formats:

  1. word, pdf, xml, odt.

Options :

  1. tagging proper names (toponyms, onomastic groups) or from a thesaurus, in TEI or other markup format;
  2. tables of contents, summaries.

RE-TRANSCRIPRO does not offer :

  1. online or paper publication;
  2. structuring a document in XML besides the encoding proposed by TEI
  3. archiving of documents.

RE-TRANSCRIPRO will examine all special requests.

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