Repository path: workshop/regimes/R21-vulgarisation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

R21 — vulgarisation (Berman's downward pole, executed)

v1.0 (frozen 2026-08-06, S124.) An R06 single pass with a numbered rule set frozen before translating and a coverage code on every logged decision, in the shape R07/R08 established.

What it is for. Berman's fifth and sixth tendances déformantes are a pair on one axis: ennoblissement, the rhetorical raising of a source's register, and vulgarisation, its counterpart downward — the « pseudo-argot », the false slang a translator reaches for when a source speaks in a popular tongue his own language has no equivalent for. RS-20260806b measured five English renderings of Verga's Sicilian and found no instance of the second: the two Victorians sat at +0.833 and +0.583 on the register scale, the unbriefed 2026 machine at −0.083, and the foreignising control at +0.500. The downward half of the axis was empty.

R21 fills it deliberately. It is a programme, not a degradation: rule 7 forbids touching the story's facts and rule 8 forbids parody, so what it produces is a serious rendering by a translator whose register policy is low — the translator Berman is complaining about, executed rather than imagined.

It is the mirror of R08 and disagrees with it rule for rule. Where R08 retains source-culture particulars unassimilated (its rule 7), R21 flattens them (rule 2); where R08 calques a figure that is not English (its rule 6), R21 substitutes a domestic low idiom (rule 5); where R08 licenses archaism (its rule 3), R21 forbids any word above the source's own level (rule 1). The one rule they share verbatim in effect is do not supply what the source withholds — R08 rule 5, R21 rule 4 — which is why the two arms are expected to part on register and not on explicitness.

Roles, human involvement

As R08. Lead translator, labeled subject, $0 (charter §3, A4). The lead never judges the output.

The rule set (frozen before translating; cited by number in the log)

V1 — No word above the source's own level. Every lexical choice is pitched at the source's register or below it. Where the Italian is neutral, the English is colloquial; where the Italian is already popular, the English is lower still. No literary, decorous, elevated or "fine" word is admitted anywhere, including in narration.

V2 — Flatten source-culture particulars to the plainest domestic form. Forms of address, honorifics, institutions, foods, place-furniture: rendered by the flattest current English equivalent, or dropped where English carries no equivalent and the sentence survives without one. Nothing is retained untranslated. (The explicit negation of R08 rule 7.)

V3 — Contract. Where English can say it in fewer words, it does. Redundancy the Italian carries for rhythm is not reproduced. The finished English should be no longer than the Italian in tokens — Berman's allongement run backwards.

V4 — Withhold what the source withholds, and do not repair. No subject, object, antecedent, connective, reason or named instrument supplied for the reader's convenience. Where English idiom would force one, an elliptical or vaguer construction is preferred to a supply.

V5 — Domestic low idiom for source idiom. Where the Italian has a proverb, a set phrase or a figure, the English takes a current colloquial English equivalent — not a calque, not the neutral standard phrase. This is Berman's « pseudo-argot » performed on purpose: the substituting idiom is English slang and is not claimed to be the source's.

V6 — Oaths and exclamations go to current profanity or current exclamation, never to archaic or pious formulae.

V7 — The propositional content is complete and unaltered. Every event, speech act, referent, participant and causal relation in the source is present in the English. Nothing is omitted, added, or changed in its facts. This is the rule that makes the output a translation and an admissible experimental arm rather than a mutilation, and any run using R21 as a control states that it is the rule the arm is checked against.

V8 — Stop short of the parodic and the incomprehensible. Venuti's own limit (R08 rule 9), taken here for the opposite direction. The English must read as a serious rendering by a translator with a low-register policy, not as a joke about one. Where a choice would raise a laugh the source does not raise, the next-lowest choice that does not is taken.

Procedure

As R08 §§1–8, with R21 substituted throughout, and:

• §5b — Every logged decision carries a coverage code: P (the rule set predicted it), D (deviation from the rule set, with reason), INT (decided by an interpretation of what the source means, not by a rule), L (a loss the rule set caused, recorded as a loss).
• §5c — V7 is checked, not assumed. Before the log is frozen, the translator walks the source and the target clause by clause and records any place where a fact, participant or event could be said to have moved. The check is part of the log.

Outputs

As R08. Additionally: the token ratio against the source, since V3 is a numerical rule.

Known limitations (by design)

• R21 is the lead's assembly from Berman's two-sentence description of vulgarisation, not Berman's own protocol. Berman describes the tendency in order to condemn it and gives no rules; a regime executing it is necessarily an interpretation. Any finding about "the downward pole" is a finding about this rule set.
• Low register in English is not Sicilian popular speech, and R21 does not claim it is. V5 substitutes an English vernacular for a Sicilian one; that substitution is precisely what Berman says destroys the source's vernacular network. R21 is therefore expected to be register-lowering and vernacular-effacing at the same time — those are not in tension, they are the tendency.
• The translator knows what the arm is for. R21 was written to occupy a pole a measurement found empty, so the rendering is not blind to its own hypothesis. This is why V7 and V8 are written as checkable constraints and why any run using it must code it blind, mixed with arms the seats cannot distinguish by provenance.
• A single translator's idea of "low" is one idiolect. The English here is one lead's colloquial register at one date; nothing about the size of a register movement generalises past it.

Changelog

• 2026-08-06 v1.0 (frozen, S124) — created for E-20260806g-berman-negative-pole, before any word of the translation was written.