Along with scanned photocopies and faxes, we legal translators are obliged to decipher and translate handwriting. This is not a bad thing because it is a form of writing that machines cannot read as well as humans which means that handwritten texts will most likely not be machine translated.
There are two types of illegible handwriting: texts written by people with not a great deal of formal schooling who may find it difficult to put words onto paper and beautiful, intricate script that many are not accustomed to. I have seen the latter on Mexican and Argentine birth certificates from the 1950s and before.
What to do when confronted with hard-to-read handwriting?
* Study the context. Read the entire passage and get a general feel for what the writer is saying. Based on context, you can sometimes extrapolate seemingly hard to read words. If there is related printed information in the rest of the document, you could possibly find some answers there. I usually have luck with people's names by doing that.
* Look for patterns. I often find that many writers of Spanish who print write their o's almost like their a's. However, if you read something like: "Estaba descansando en mi caso con mi familia", you know that what looks like an "o" to you is really an "a". Then you can look at the rest of the "o's" and "a's" and figure out which is which. Numbers are also written differently according to each person. Once you have established a pattern, things get easier.
* Finally, don't hesitate to ask. What looks like chicken scratches to you may be readily understood by someone else. I have been able to get help through KudoZ. What you need to do first is snip the illegible portion of the document (with some surrounding words for context) as an image file, upload it to Dropbox or Evernote, create a link, and then post that link in your KudoZ question. That way, KudoZ answerers can view the text themselves and provide you with the answer you were seeking.
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