The transcription process is a very tedious yet interesting procedure. With the use of transcription, people can gain access to millions of archives that they had no previous chance of having . In addition, the use of transcription allows people to easily read the writing from the original document which they may have previously not been able to interpret.
First off, reading over and researching the background information of the document is key. Often times, these ancient documents contain more than one language in their writings depending on the time and cultural influence in which they were written. For example, in the Powell Diary the Moravian writers used both English and German (like Jrinnirlich) in their writings often making it confusing and hard to interpret. After doing background research the next step is to start copying the words from the original document onto a digital document with applications like TextEdit. Although many words are easily legible, some words in each document are hard to read due to smudges or because lines are drawn through them. Even if lines are drawn through a word, it is still important to include the word in the digital version of the document. Finally, it is also important to note the dates and preserve the same number of words per line of the original document in the digital version to give the most accurate transcription possible.