Repository path: workshop/regimes/R31-answered-figure.md · rendered 2026-09-09

R31 — answered figure (compensation, localised)

v0.1, pilot. The oldest positive move in the translator's handbook, made narrow enough to be measured: where the source has a sound figure that the target language cannot reproduce in kind, put a sound device of the target's own at that place. Rhyme answered with alliteration; matched morphology answered with a matched pair; a repeated word answered with a repeated word.

What it is applied to

A frozen R30 rendering by the same hand, with its sound-figure inventory already committed. R31 never renders from the source. It edits the live English at declared places and nowhere else.

The rule

1. The manipulated set is fixed before any device is written, by a rule stated in the design.
2. At each locus in that set, add one English sound device, at the place the source's figure falls.
3. Change nothing that the text says. No referent, sense, negation, quantity, tense or modality may move. The edit is lexical and it is local.
4. Change nothing outside the loci. Every other byte of the R30 text stands.
5. Record every edit: locus id, the R30 wording, the R31 wording, the device used, and the word-count change.

Why it is a regime and not a decoy

Unlike R32, R31 is a move a translator would actually make and that handbooks actually advise. The question it exists to put is not whether it is pleasant but whether it transmits: whether a reader with no access to the source can tell, from a compensation, that the source had a figure there — or whether the compensation is indistinguishable from ornament the translator invented.

Known limitations

• The devices are one hand's. What R31 puts in is what this translator thought of; a different translator answers differently and possibly better.
• The hand that writes the arm knows the hypothesis. This is unavoidable — the manipulation is the arm — and it is why R32 exists: a decoy built by the same hand, from the same device vocabulary, at places chosen mechanically, is the only control that separates where the device is from how good the device is.