3. The workshop
For its first fifteen sessions the project did not translate. It built a jury, a typology, an anchor shelf and an essay, and on July 25 its owner pointed out that after "roughly 105,000 words of notes and analysis" the translations folder "held a README and nothing else." The reorientation of that day let the AI translate, and the practice that followed is the project's largest asset.
The corpus
By the close the directory of translations held 329 filed translations, every one made by the lead model, from thirty-odd source languages by a close-out count — Russian a fifth of them, then Japanese, German, French, Persian, Arabic and Italian, thinning out to single works in Turkish, Korean and modern Greek. Fourteen went into a language other than English. The whole corpus, translations and apparatus together, runs to about a million words.
Material was chosen under the rule the charter set on July 25, freely available first: public domain, readable online, and preferably with a published translation that was also free, "so the reading can be complete." Six short Japanese works from Aozora Bunko stayed fixed as a comparison set; everything else came from Wikisource in six languages, Project Gutenberg, the Hungarian electronic library, the Arabic Hindawi edition, the Persian Ganjoor corpus. Two candidate works were discarded by the contamination gate described in section 4, and two more were rejected for the first long work because "no freely reachable English" existed to measure against.
Regimes
Every translation was made under a written regime, and the regime directory is the project's instrument case. When the lead began to translate, the close-rendering regime specified a discipline: source only, no published rendering opened until the log is frozen, a draft written out and frozen before revision, contamination declared. Sixty per cent of the corpus is that regime and its frozen first draft. From late July almost every new regime was a single pass plus a frozen rule set, and the rule sets were the experiments: Venuti's domesticating checklist and his foreignizing practice, applied to the same passage; Berman's downward pole in four doses; carry every mark of footing, or carry them selectively; answer every rhyme, or refuse them. Thirty regimes have exactly one filed translation. That is what isolating the cost of one choice at a time looks like — and, as section 12 notes, what a rabbit hole looks like from inside.
The log
The rule that made the corpus evidence rather than output is the translator's log: "written at translation time and frozen before any evaluation of that translation is designed," recording "decisions and alternatives, not quality," with any evaluative sentence flagged as the translator's own unverified judgment. The record calls this "process observation from inside a translator, at no cost," and is candid about its limit: "The log is self-report," and "decisions made without noticing them do not appear." When the first twenty logs — 380 decisions — were read as a corpus and coded before any sense was consulted, 291 fell cleanly under a sense, 26 stretched one, and 44 were residue; one residue class became a rule. The logs also produced a rule about themselves: three of five tally lines over one log were wrong on first writing, "every one was caught by parsing and none by rereading."
The prose
The owner asked to see the work, and the daily reports quoted it; the mirror holds all of it. Four passages give the range, each with the problem it was chosen to show.
Verga, "Jeli il pastore," the sheep-shearing feast, translated serially in five sittings (July 28):
It was a fine warm day, in the yellow fields, with the hedges in flower, and the long green rows of the vines; the sheep skipped and bleated for the pleasure of feeling themselves stripped of all that wool, and in the kitchen the women were making a great fire to cook the great lot of provisions the master had brought for the dinner.
Era una bella giornata calda, nei campi biondi, colle siepi in fiore, e i lunghi filari verdi delle vigne, le pecore saltellavano e belavano dal piacere, al sentirsi spogliate da tutta quella lana, e nella cucina le donne facevano un gran fuoco per cuocere la gran roba che il padrone aveva portato per il desinare.
Verga's paratactic village voice kept as "and … and … and"; roba, "Verga's great word," rendered provisions here and four ways across the book, because "the register never had a row for it — it is too ordinary to look like terminology." — the translation and its log
Chekhov, "The Malefactor," one line of a peasant's testimony under three regimes (August 15):
No rule: "Us, the people… the Klimovo peasants, that is."
Light ennoblement: "We, the people… the Klimovo peasants, that is."
Ennoblement: "We, the common people… the peasantry of Klimovo, that is to say."
— Мы, народ… Климовские мужики, то есть.
The dose of Berman's ennoblissement made visible: one case-form is the whole of the light step; the heavy step rewrites the peasant's mouth. — the ennobled rendering
Hafez, ghazal 131, the refrain-word کرد carried whole by inversion (August 29):
Come — heaven's Turk upon the table of the fast his depredation made; / the feast's new moon toward the circling of the cup its indication made. / The merit of the fast, and of the pilgrimage that is received, he bore / who to the dust of love's own tavern his visitation made.
A Persian ghazal ends every couplet with the same word after the rhyme, the radif. English can host it only by inverting the clause; here it held at nine positions of nine, at a price section 8 measures. — the rendering and its grades
Lazarević, "The First Time at Matins with My Father," a Serbian shopkeeper dismisses his clerk (August 11):
This was at Đurđevdan. Proka came into the shop to have his book signed over again. My father took out ninety groš and said: "There — there's your wages. I have no further use for you; go and look for somewhere they pitch coins." Proka pulled his fes down over his eyes and cried like rain and begged.
From the log: "English has the identical institution under a different saint — Michaelmas, Lady Day, the term-day, the hiring fair. Carrying Đurđevdan over keeps the saint and loses the institution; writing Michaelmas keeps the institution and moves the story to England. I kept Đurđevdan and let the institution go." — the translation
None of these is offered as good. The rules of the project do not allow me to say so, and section 6 explains why the outside jury could not say so either. What each one carries is a decision, named at the time, with its alternative and its price — which is the unit the rest of this essay counts.