Through the course of genealogical research, one might come across Polish documents, such as censuses, regional and geogpaphical descriptions, etc.
Non-Polish speakers might need to familiarize themselves with the terminology and some basic words associated with Jewish life in 16-18 centuries. Such as the words associated with Jewish professions, types of settlements, variations of renter and co-habitation statuses, Jewish religious titles, etc. Those terms have evolved over the past 100 years, hence direct "Google-translate" may not represent an accurate meaning of the time. To navigate the aforementuioned documents, one could refer to Jewish Gen Jewish Occupations Primer; also Polish genealogical sources offer extended lists covering Jewish topics. Use those to navigate geographical and sociological descriptions, in order to create an accurate picture of the Jewish community. One shall read the documents very carefully and understand the context properly.
EXAMPLE 1:
The 16th century Ukrainian sources often portrayed the Jews as land tenants exploiting local farmers. If one had looked at the Polish records for Jewish poll tax, it would seem that literally every head of a Jewish family was a land tenant. This is of course an absurd.
In fact the word arendarz has multiple meanings.
The word arendarz could mean a property leassee (a head of the family) which is renting a home, or a homestead farm from a Polish noble (szliachta) or a wealthy land owner (magnates). This was typically not a wealthy family. They primarilly participated in various trades, and used small sections of land large enough to suport their family (example: a vegetable garden).
The same word arendarz could mean a person, that is leasing/managing the entire estate. This could have been an agricultural land, a large farm with a farmstead, a flour mill, a restaurant, etc. Some (not all) of those people were indeed Jews. Those arendarz were positioned by the wealthy owners to manage the production, and to collect paymnets/taxes from the agricultural community. Accoring to Jewish Virtual Library , by the mid XVII century this professional category amounted to a super-tiny proportion of the entire Jewish population of > 200,000. This is especially tru in case of modern-day Belarus and Ukraine. Yet, both Ukrainian Hetmanate and Tsarist Russian government have condemned and stigmatized the entire Jewish population for some alleged actions of a few.
EXAMPLE 2:
The naming of the regions, specific townships, cities and hamlets is ofthen sound the same in Polish, Ukrainian and Russian. This provides a hint to an original ownership. For example, the Ukrainian village Velika Visi (UKR: selo Велика Вісь) is a likely a direct transliteration from the Polish "Welikaja Wies" (the Polish word for village is wieś ). Following this hint, one would discover that this was a first land deed given to Cossacks by the Polish King Sigizmun III . This, for example, helps to determine a 'time of arrival' of Jews and cossacks. In this specific case, the hamlet used to belong to Polish Perocki family - the owners of Ripky.
EXAMPLE 3:
The naming of towns and hamlets often migrated between the slavic languages with minor variations. For example, the words mestechko (Russian: "местечко") and Ukrainian mistechko (Ukrainian: "містечко") represent the romanized version of the Polish word "miastechko" (Polish: mjaˈstɛtʂkɔ / miasteczko). This is useful for understanding of original settlement time frame and its function.