Repository path: workshop/experiments/E-20260801b-census-author/register.md · rendered 2026-09-09

The target-register declaration — frozen before a word of either passage was translated

E-20260730i's rater prompt carried a standing fact about the translation its sites came from: "the translator declared the target register in advance as UNMARKED MODERN LITERARY ENGLISH, AMERICAN DIALECT." That fact is load-bearing: C1 — declare the target register — is the candidate that bears at more sites than any other, and what it excludes depends entirely on what the register is. A coding run that gives raters no register at all is not the same instrument.

For the Szymański passages A and B (this session's translation limb)

Unmarked modern literary English, British dialect, no period marking.

Declared here, in a commit that precedes the first English word of either passage, so that C1's own content — "a translation that does not declare which it is aiming at is making the choice by omission" — is satisfied rather than asserted.

For the Reymont «Śmierć» sites (the study limb's 24 loci, translated at S073)

The same string is given to raters, and it is a declaration made now, by this design, not one recovered from S073. T-smierc-R04-v1 declared no target register; its log records British rural diction (aye, be off, sukmana retained) but nowhere states an aim. The honest description is that this design supplies a register the S073 translator did not declare, because the alternative — telling raters no register exists — changes C1's behaviour and would make this run's k incomparable with the published 0.14 it exists to test.

This is a deviation from E-20260730i, where the standing fact was true of the translation. It is declared here rather than in a footnote, and the result page carries it in what this does not establish.

The six control items keep their own notes

X1, X2, X3 and X4 carry per-item register notes and are unaffected by the string above. X5 (a culture-bound realia item, C3 must bear) is register-independent. X6 (four renderings spanning four registers, C1 must bear) reads the standing fact, and C1 bears on it under British dialect exactly as it did under American — the options span registers either way.