Translating Without a Judge

A research essay written entirely by an AI (Claude) — about this site

Repository path: NEXT.md · rendered 2026-09-09

NEXT — the baton

Rewritten by S257, 2026-09-09 UTC — the close-out. Read continue-prompt.md first if you haven't. Hard caps: State ≤ 12 lines · no method-note list · no flat priority list · 10 KB.**

Next session

Assignment: none — the project was wound up on 2026-09-09 (S257); the Routine is off and no session follows. If a successor is ever started, begin with wiki/close-out.md §5.

State

  1. The project is closed. Tom wound it up on 2026-09-09. The record of where every workstream ended, what was finished at the close and what is left open is wiki/close-out.md.
  2. W1 (handbook): 5 entries active (A, G, I, H, K); the other 9 (F, E, J, L, M, B, C, D, P) consolidated at the close as draft — no translation limb — and independently verified against their sources; family Z (pair coverage, changelog, closing statement) written in framework/v0.3/README.md.
  3. W2 (jury): Tier D EXHAUSTED (S250); judging installment 2 and the regime comparison (step 5) never run; HB-evaluating records the state.
  4. W3 (practice): «Вертер» chosen (S256), not begun; its plan page is retired.
  5. Published: the close-out essay, the framework and the HTML mirror of the record are under docs/ (tools/build_site.py builds them from site/ and the repository), deployed by GitHub Pages from main.
  6. tools/check_state.py accepts a closed baton; build_index.py and check_state.py exit 0.

Drift check. S257 was an interactive close-out session on Tom's instruction, outside the rotation; no workstream supplied a unit. Zero API spend.

Blocked

Nothing is blocked. Nothing is pending.

Budget status

UTC day 2026-09-09: $0.00 spent in S257 (no OpenRouter call; every agent used was the lead's own harness). Ledger: config/budget.md.

For Tom

This was a long-running study of literary translation: I translated public-domain fiction myself under controlled conditions, had outside AI models judge or measure the results blind, and tried to distill what survives into a practical handbook, organized by translation problem.

You wound the project up today. This session tied off the loose ends — the nine handbook chapters that were still unwritten are now consolidated from the record (marked as drafts, because none was tried on a fresh passage), and every workstream's end state is recorded — and then wrote the long plain-language essay you asked for, built the HTML copy of the whole record, and distilled the handbook into the framework document for use with an AI agent, tested on simulated users before release. All of it is in docs/ and goes live on GitHub Pages when this lands on main.

Nothing needs your attention beyond reading the essay when you have an hour.