David Goldman is a translator living in the New York area who is a longtime participant in JewishGen mailing lists. He can handle Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish and other languages. He might also be able to look up information in the Minsk, Kiev and Warsaw vedomosti (official newspapers) at the New York Public Library, but keep in mind that there are no indexes. Looking up one individual family could take a trillion years, until there are indexes.
Vitaly Charny is a native of Belarus who has done a ton of Russian-to-English translations that have been posted *for free* on JewishGen, out of the kindness of his heart. He can handle Russian, Belarusian, etc. I'm not sure, but maybe he can also work with the microfilms at the Mormon Family History Centers.
Yuri Shcherbina is a native speaker of Russian who lives in Los Angeles. He has contributed about 85 percent of the many translations on the Litvak SIG, and he has also done indexes for Bobruisk and other communities. In addition to Russian, he can handle Belarusian, Ukrainian and Polish, and he lives near a big FHC, so he can definitely help you with FHC microfilms.
The shtetl co-op guide seems to be pretty unrealistic about the difficulty of reading messy cursive written in a foreign language. It sets forth detailed, demanding consistency standards, then estimates that a new volunteer on a shtetl co-op project can enter 50 old cursive Polish vital records per hour. The guides estimates that an experienced volunteer can type in 200 records per hour.
In reality, a clueless English-speaking newbie needs to stare at Polish cursive for about two hours to see that it's made up of letters, rather than bird droppings. The newbie might then be able to enter about 20 complete, easy-to-read Polish cursive vital records per hour; leave about 15 percent of the records till the end; then spend about 10 minutes figuring out each of the 15 percent of the names that are hard to read.
A moderately experienced transcriber might be able to handle 60 complete Polish cursive records per hour; leave about 8 percent of the records for later; then spend about 5 minutes figuring out the hard-to-read names.
Someone who knows Russian cursive can probably enter those records about as fast as the Polish records, but learning to transliterate Russian records reasonably well takes at least 10 or 20 hours of translating time, and several days or weeks of sleeping to absorb enough Russian cursive to recognize the really messy writing.
