This is a group for specialists -- translators; scholars, academics, and graduate students in various fields; and professional genealogists, among others -- who translate or work with non-current (18th- to 20th-century) German, including old handwritten or typed letters and diaries, printed documents, and historical or literary material of all sorts. Its purpose is to pool members' expertise and resources in terminology, regional terms and variants, non-standard grammar, official jargon, social and cultural conventions, and other elements that make a given text difficult to convey in English.

Guidelines for posting:
1. Queries must provide context. This should include:
* At least the sentence in which the word being queried;
* A description of the document in terms of approximate date, type of text, provenance, and anything else that would point list members in the right direction or provide clues, including your own hunches, reasons for rejecting the obvious, etc. Be explicit!

2. Any resources consulted, including published works, Web sites, and experts should be cited (title, URL, etc). This way we can all expand our knowledge of what is out there. Do some homework before querying the list.

3. All responses should be cited (title, URL, etc.; for the same reasons as in 2.).

4. Do not send in guesses, unless they are based on sufficiently solid experience. If you must send a guess, send it to the querier, not to the list.

5. Please don't send "thank-yous" to the list -- they should go to the person answering the query. If we see that a response is going to be helpful, let us all say a private "thank you."