Repository path: workshop/regimes/R18-declared-persona.md · rendered 2026-09-09

R18 — declared narratorial persona

v1.0 (frozen 2026-08-05, S112.) An R06 (lead, source-only, single pass, no revision) whose narratorial persona specification — a prose characterisation of who the reader of the translation is to meet — is written out and frozen before the source is read for translation. Two R18 runs over the same source unit under two different persona specifications form a matched pair in which the propositional content is held fixed by construction and the person is the only declared variable.

Why it exists

wiki/goodness-senses.md defines voice as "whether the translation realizes, for its readers, the source work's characterized authorial or narratorial perspective", and names five carriers — register, rhythm, diction temperature, idiosyncrasy, distance. Its reachability note (S097) says in as many words what does not exist: "a design in which the same source persona is realised two ways on purpose and a blind jury is asked which reader met which person, with the source withheld from them." R18 is the apparatus that makes the person a variable so that design can be run.

R18 stands to voice as R11 stands to purpose-fit and R10 to naturalness: it converts a stipulated property of a translation into a target the translator aims at and a reader can be asked about. A single R18 run measures nothing — the translator's own report that a persona was realised is internal-judgment-only. The matched pair is what carries evidence.

The persona specification — the binding constraints

1. It names a person, not a set of textual properties. A specification says who is speaking, what he is like, what he does not notice. It is a character sketch.
2. It may not be written in the vocabulary of wiki/goodness-senses.md, and it may not be written in the vocabulary of any rating instrument the pair will later be measured on. Note (bio): a specification that restates the measure manufactures the result. The mapping from a specification to a predicted movement on a measure is a prediction, declared separately, and never the specification itself.
3. Both specifications are frozen and committed before either rendering is drafted. They are not required to precede the reading of the source, and this is the one place R18 cannot copy R11. A declared purpose is exogenous to the text; a persona is a reading of it, and the apt specification cannot be written by a translator who has not read the narrator. The freeze that matters here is therefore against the renderings, not against the source: spec A is the translator's reading, spec B names a different person saying the same things, and both are committed before a line of either translation exists. A run records that commit order and the verifier checks it.
4. The paired specifications differ in the person and not in the content. Both renderings assert the same propositions in the same order; a divergence of content is a defect of the pair, and a pair is not usable until an independent content-parity screen has been run over it.

Rules

• P1. Source only. No published rendering of the source in any language is opened before both renderings and both logs are frozen (continue-prompt.md §5.2).
• P2. Single pass per rendering, no revision stage. Each rendering is written straight through against its own frozen specification.
• P3. Every logged decision records the specification clause it acted on, or records — where the specification was silent and the decision was the translator's own.
• P4. The two renderings are written in a fixed declared order, and the order is recorded. The second is written from the source, with the first's propositional inventory in view, and its log declares the dependence and what follows from it.

  Amended 2026-08-05, the same session that minted the regime, by the first pair to use it. P4 first read "the first is not consulted while the second is drafted", which contradicts P5: propositional parity cannot be achieved without the first member in view. P5 wins, because parity is what makes the pair a controlled contrast and independence is not something an R18 pair can offer anyway — both members have the same translator. The consequence binds every R18 run: the second member is not an independent second translation, shared wording between members is carryover, not convergence, and an R18 pair is evidence about a within-translator contrast and nothing else. T-max-havelaar-i-b-R18-v2 §The dependence declared.

• P5. Sentence-for-sentence propositional parity is the construction rule: every proposition asserted in one rendering is asserted in the other. Where a specification makes a proposition awkward, the proposition is kept and the wording changes.
• P6. A dialect of English is declared and held (as R07 §F5), so that the pair is not separated by orthography.

What R18 does not do

It does not claim the specified person is the source's person. That is exactly the question a paired R18 run is built to put to readers who cannot see the source, and the answer is theirs.