Repository path: workshop/regimes/R29-fluent-carriage.md · rendered 2026-09-09

R29 — fluent carriage (carriage without calque)

v1.0, pilot, frozen 2026-08-15 (S189) before the source was read for translation. Written for ARM-fluent-carriage step 1.

Why it exists

R08 (resistancy) buys source-carriage by importing the source's exponents — calqued figures, retained word order, licensed archaism — and pays for it in English that reads as translated. R07 (fluency) buys readable English by discarding the source's form. Every arm this project has built sits on one horn or the other, which is why four runs on perceived-source-carriage cannot say whether a reader is registering carriage or registering awkwardness (ARM-fluent-carriage).

R29 exists to test whether the trade is necessary. Its wager is the one working literary translators make: that a source's formal effect can be carried by target-language resources that are themselves unmarked — and that what produces translationese is not carriage but the lazy import of the exponent.

The wager may lose. Rule C3 is written so that losing is recorded rather than hidden.

Roles

• Translator — the lead agent, as a labeled subject (charter §3, A4). No panel call, no API cost.
• Judge — never the lead (charter §5).

Human involvement

None.

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

C1 — Declare the device set before translating. Before the first sentence is rendered, enumerate the source's form-only devices as a numbered site table: class id, paragraph, source string. Form-only means the device may be removed without changing what the text says — rhythm, ordering, repetition, suspension, iteration, segmentation, attribution shape. Only listed sites are carried under this regime. Anything not listed is rendered as ordinary English, and image-bearing material (figures, similes, named particulars, loanwords, referents) is Class B and is not available to the rule set at all.

C2 — Carry the device, not the exponent. At each site, name what the source form does, then find the English resource that does it. The source's own exponent may never be imported: no calqued word order, no romanised mimetic, no source punctuation English lacks, no borrowed clause type. The log records the English resource used, by name.

C3 — The English must pass unaided, and a failure is recorded not hidden. Every sentence must be one a competent English writer could have written with no source behind it. If a site cannot be carried without producing a sentence that reads as translated, the site is rendered as ordinary English and recorded FAILED. The FAILED count is this regime's own result and is reported with the translation whether or not any evaluation follows.

C4 — No compensation by elevation. Carriage may not be bought with raised register, archaism, Latinate diction, or period flavour. A site carried by making the English older or grander is recorded FAILED, not carried.

C5 — Content is not a carriage device. Nothing propositional may change to serve a device. No referent, sense, negation, quantity, tense, modality or item of content may be added, removed or altered to make a carriage work.

C6 — One dialect, current and standard. The target register is unmarked / literary-contemporary (A-mchugh-presence), declared here and held. The translator declares British or American usage and does not mix them.

C7 — Log as you write. Each site: class, paragraph, source string, chosen English, the English resource used, and CARRIED or FAILED. Any evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only.

Procedure

1. R06 §1 unchanged. Source only. The translator reads no published rendering of the same source into any target language before the translation and its log are frozen. Priming, if any, is declared.
2. This rule set is frozen and committed before the source is read for translation. The commit is the freeze. A rule may not be added, deleted or reworded once translating has begun; a rule discovered to be missing is recorded in the log as missing and the version is bumped in a later run.
3. The C1 site table is written and committed before the first sentence is rendered. This is the ordering the regime turns on: a device set assembled after translating is a description of what the translator happened to do.
4. Translate once, straight through. No return pass.
5. The log is written as the draft is written, decision by decision.
6. Any tally over the log is computed by a committed script that parses the log (note (bey), workshop/translations/README.md).

What R29 is not

• It is not a claim that the wager wins. It is an executable form of the wager, with a declared way of losing (C3, C4).
• It is not R08 with better manners. R08's rules license the exponent; C2 forbids it.
• It is not a quality regime. Nothing in the rule set says the result is good, and the lead never judges its own translation.

Pairing

R29 is built to be paired with R14 (matched-content flattening) applied at exactly the C1 sites and nowhere else, so that the pair differs only in whether the declared devices are carried, with all Class B material held byte-identical. That pairing is what makes carriage a manipulation rather than a description.