Writing a letter

[bobsmodels1]

Hi
I am writing a letter to a company in Italy that has my ancestors surname in its title. It is in the place he was born. I am pretty sure they are either relatives or know the family. My mother and father visited the town in 1976 and the buildings and pictures they had match up with a google drive by of the area.

The letter will be a paper letter in the mail. Main reason is that if they are not related but know who is it will be easier for them to hand it off. I will have my email address in it if they choose to communicate with me, which I hope they will as I have a number of questions, mainly picture identification. I have a genealogy tree of my ancestor here in the USA if they would be interested.

I have a couple of questions on writing the letter.

I would like the opening to be formal ( I think?) ie Dear Mr. or Mrs or Miss Surname. How is that written if I do not know which?

Is the dialect important, it is in the Turin area, specifically Sparone.?

Will on online translator work OK? I am planning on sending both English and an Italian translation.

Anything else that can help?

Thank You in advance for the assistance

Bob

[darkerhorse]

I'm not familiar with the north of Italy but I would suggest you don't rely solely on online translators.

Maybe you could first generate a draft using an online translator and then post it here for comment.

Or, if you didn't want to post it publicly you could ask if someone would review your letter using the private message function. I'm not qualified to do so.

My guess is that dialect wouldn't be necessary, and that, in Turin, proper Italian would be just fine. But again, I don't know.

Sending the letter in both languages might be a good idea. I've done that with an email to a town hall in Sicily would good results They appreciated the attempt to use their language and they also understood English to confirm what I meant.

[darkerhorse]

It wouldn't surprise me if residents of Turin, being located in the far north of Italy, are also fluent in other foreign languages like German, French or Swiss. If that works better for you.

Remember Gustav Thoni, the Italian Olympic alpine skier?

[PippoM]

Remember Gustav Thoni, the Italian Olympic alpine skier?

Gustav Thoeni was NOT fluent in German...He is German native speaker!

[cedrone]

I agree with the suggestion to write the letter and post here or send by PM for corrections.

You may address the letter to the Company otr to the Director of the company.
And begin with 'Dear Sirs' or 'Dear Sir'

You should write in Italian, the only language of all Italy, dialects have never been used for written correspondence and are now even less used and understood.
Only in some regions bordering other countries there are other official languages, beyond Italian.
French in Valle d'Aosta, German and Ladino in Alto Adige, Slovenian in Friuli-Venezia Giulia.
Other languages are recognized in other small areas.
English is not a language of any part of Italy.

[bobsmodels1]

Cedrone, Darkerhorse

Thank you for the suggestions. Here is what I did. I wrote out the letter in English, used the google translator to Italian. I then used the google translator to go from the Italian back to English. Saw a lot of context issues i.e. colloquialism that did not translate and pronoun issues. I then changed sentence structure and modified references. After about six or so tries The English to Italian, back to English was a very good. I then found another online translator that did not use google translate. I took the google Italian and converted it English using the other translator. This found some additional context issues. Finally after a number of changes and using the other translator back an forth with google they all produced “the same result” close enough.

I think the Italian version I have now should be just fine. I am going to send the both the English and Italian versions.

Any further suggestions?

Bob

[darkerhorse]

Using an iterative translation process was a great idea. I never thought of that.

My suggestion is give yourself a gold star.