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I have images of notarial documents from the Netherlands. These are land records, hand written in the 19th century and 2-8 pages in length. I don't speak or read Dutch. I engaged a professional genealogist to translate them. He suggested that he abstract them first to save money and if required later provide a full translation. The question is how to cite the document and abstract.
Do I put the author of the abstract at the beginning of the citation? Or do I place the abstract information at the end of the citation using "citing". Or some other approach to this citation?
Pupsley1, from your generic…
Pupsley1, from your generic description, I can only give you a generic answer. The key point to consider here is that you are not citing the original notarial documents. You are citing abstracts created by a third party. The accuracy of the information you take from any of those depends entirely upon the accuracy of the person who creates the translated abstract. You do not say whether the translator/abstractor provided (a) one titled report that includes abstracts of all the documents; or (2) a separate "document" for each original, outside the framework of a report. That makes a difference.
Your basic format would seem to be be 3.44 Research Files & Reports, Personal File Copy, example 1, with a "citing" layer added to identify the specific original notarial document.
Yes, you will cite the creator of the abstract/report at the beginning of the citation. That's standard for citing virtually everything. First, we identify the creator of whatever it is we're using. Past that point, the title of the item you are citing will depend upon the manner in which the abstracts were provided to you. If all are combined into one report, then you have one report to cite and your title field would use the report title, followed by the other items specified in 3.44. If each abstract was sent to you as an individual item, then you would have to cite each one separately, according to the title or header used by the abstractor.