Graduate students translate the redi In 2005, a bit of Milwaukee history was unearthed in an old metal box. Located at Pabst Farms in Oconomowoc, the box held about 350 letters written from 1841 to 1887 by members of the Pabst and Best families, founders of what became the Pabst Brewing Company. The letters, however, were written in a German script that is difficult to understand. Fifteen years later, two UWM students tackled that challenge and revealed what the long-lost letters say. In spring 2020, the Pabst Mansion set up a partnership with UWM’s Translation and Interpreting Studies program to translate the letters. Over the course of an eight-week summer internship, Nastassja Myer and Marisa Irwin, graduate students in Translation and Interpreting Studies, translated and transcribed 50 pages of letters. The letters were largely personal in nature, often written between members of the Pabst and Best families, to their friends or to their business partners from across the country.
Irwin grew up in Milwaukee surrounded by the Pabst legacy. To read the words of these Milwaukee contemporaries that she had learned about for years, she said, was eyeopening. “You felt like you were getting a peek into their private lives,” Irwin said. “You can’t really get more Nastassja Myer authentic than that.”
Viktorija Bilic, associate professor in Translation and Interpreting Studies and a coordinator on the project, said that the letters also show readers a little about the culture of Milwaukee at that time. “They show what a German “One of the things I’ve enjoyed about this project was that it wasn’t just transcribing and translation,” Myer said. “It was place Milwaukee was that they could speak German with a lot of genealogy and local history. So many things had to almost anyone around them.” come together to correctly read the letters. It was more than Combining two languages a translation project; it was a historical project as well.” The process is not as simple as reading the original The letters are steeped in Milwaukee history. The Best script and writing it down in English, Bilic said. “One of family created the brewing company after emigrating from the challenges is reading the script, this old German Germany. Pabst Brewing Co. started as Best & Company, handwriting. If you don’t get that right, then the translation then later became Phillip Best Brewing Company during can’t be right either.” the time these letters were written. Frederick Pabst, Best’s son-in-law who owned half the company’s stock, purchased The letters’ authors used the German Kurrent script, half of the company’s stock after his father-in-law passed which is difficult to read even for those fluent in German, away and bought the remaining half when his brother-in-law Irwin said. The language is even more difficult, she said, also passed, leaving him sole owner of the company. He because Germany did not have a standardized spelling renamed it Pabst Brewing Co. and expanded the company. system until the early 20th century.
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“So even when you have the handwriting, when you’ve discovered what the word is, it may not be how it’s spelled currently,” Irwin said. “You have to ask yourself,
