Repository path: workshop/regimes/R22-placeless-low.md · rendered 2026-09-09

R22 — placeless low (vulgarisation with the map removed)

v1.0 (frozen 2026-08-08, S137.) 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/R21 established. R22 is R21 with one rule replaced and one rule added. Everything else is R21 verbatim.

What it is for

T-malavoglia-i-R21-v1's translator's log, frozen 2026-08-08 before any measurement, made a claim the rule set could not settle and marked it INT:

going low in English is dialect-shaped, not just register-shaped. A wrong 'un, them that, off his grandad, dead spit are all British and several are specifically northern or London. There is no unmarked low English. […] every additional step down was also a step toward a particular English place, and a Sicilian fishing village written in Cockney is a joke about translation.

That claim, if true, is the binding constraint on any framework recommendation of the form "where the source marks low register, carry it" — because it says the carrying cannot be done without relocating the book. R22 exists to make the claim testable by subtraction: it is a low-register programme with every locatable means removed. What is left, if anything, is the low English that costs no place.

It is not a strawman and not a degradation. A translator who wants a source's popular speech in English but does not want a Sicilian village speaking Lancashire is in exactly R22's position, and it is a common and defensible stance. R22 executes it rather than imagining it. Rule W7 forbids touching the story's facts and W8 forbids parody, so the output is a serious rendering by a translator whose register policy is low and whose variety policy is neutral.

What it predicts about itself, written before translating. If the R21 log's claim is right, R22 will be unable to reach R21's depth and will go down by getting barer rather than lower — which is RS-20260806g §2's original finding, and would mean the two results are one result seen from two sides. If the claim is wrong, R22 reaches the same depth by other means and the framework can recommend carriage without relocation. Both outcomes are informative and the rule set is indifferent between them.

Roles, human involvement

As R21. 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)

W1 — No word above the source's own level. R21 V1 verbatim.

W2 — Flatten source-culture particulars to the plainest domestic form. R21 V2 verbatim.

W3 — Contract. R21 V3 verbatim, including the numerical clause: the finished English is no longer than the source in tokens.

W4 — Withhold what the source withholds, and do not repair. R21 V4 verbatim.

W5 — THE PLACELESS RULE. Replaces R21 V5. Where the source has a proverb, a set phrase, a figure or a popular turn, the English takes the lowest rendering built only from means available in every standard variety of English: contraction, ellipsis, parataxis, common Germanic lexis, plain deixis, bare verbs, short clauses. No lexical item, idiom, or grammatical form that a competent reader would locate to a particular national variety of English, a region within one, a social class, or a period.

The operational test, applied at every site and logged: would a reader in another English-speaking country register this choice as belonging somewhere else, or as marking the speaker's class? If yes, it is locatable and inadmissible. Where the only low option available is locatable, the site takes the lowest placeless option instead and the difference is logged as a loss under L.

Two consequences are stated here so they are not discovered as deviations: class-marked grammar is locatable (them that, he don't, ain't), and so is any eye-dialect or apostrophised elision that marks a variety rather than ordinary speed of speech.

W6 — NOTHING IS ADDED. New rule, and it is a gate, not a preference. No oath, intensifier, epithet, tag, exclamation or emphatic that the source does not have. RS-20260808e §6.2 measured a low-instructed arm adding an element the source lacks at 13 of 41 sites (0.3171) — an oath, as hell, right, eh?, old girl, silly, skin and bone. Register reached by supplying is not register carried, and an arm that supplies it is not evidence about the source's register at all. Where the English feels flat without an emphatic, it stays flat.

W7 — The propositional content is complete and unaltered. R21 V7 verbatim.

W8 — Stop short of the parodic and the incomprehensible. R21 V8 verbatim.

Procedure

As R21: one pass from the source alone, no published rendering consulted while translating, a return pass permitted only to satisfy W3's numerical clause with every cut named in the log. Coverage codes on every logged decision: P predicted by the rule set · D deviation with reason · INT decided by interpretation · L a loss the rule set caused.

W5 additionally requires a per-site record of the rejected locatable option, so that the cost of the constraint is visible rather than asserted. This is the rule set's own evidence and it is what R22 exists to produce.

Relation to the other regimes

R21 and R22 differ on one dimension by construction. That is what makes the pair readable.