Een Waarlojk Vrie cover

A colleague of Dr Sietsma, Reverend C. J. Sikkel wrote a short book about his life in 1946, after the war ended. It was titled “Een Waarlijk Vrie” or “A Truly Free Person”.

Dr Sietsma’s son Arie Sietsma wrote an English translation around 1996, I’ve uploaded a copy here (although the document I had was ancient DOC file - it still needs some cleaning up!)

I (Korny - Dr Sietsma’s grandson) wanted to make Arie’s translation a bit more accessible, but didn’t want to just reword his text - it felt more accurate to go back to the source.

So I managed to get a second hand copy of the book, scan it and use OCR tools to convert it to text - you can read the Dutch text of the book here - there may still be mistakes here, I had to clean up a lot of the text by hand.

And then I used a mixture of LLM tools - mostly Deepl and Claude - to generate new translations from Dutch. And then I went through the 3 translations in parallel, trying to find a common text that is faithful to Arie’s version and the original text. (I also checked a handful of tricky passages with Dutch reading friends)

Here is my english translation of the book

I’m happy to make adjustments if anyone sees inaccuracies or mistranslations! I still plan to make some tweaks myself, time permitting. I’d also like to make a simplified version for my kids to read as they get old enough to understand their family history.