Repository path: workshop/translations/atsui-suna/R14-v2/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-atsui-suna-R14-v2 — the same story with only the FORM-ONLY devices flattened

Derived from T-atsui-suna-R29-v1 by R14 (matched-content flattening), scoped to the four Class A device classes that survived an independent content-parity audit and to nothing else. R14 renders from the live English, never from the source; here it is scoped further, and the scoping is the point of this second version.

Why there is a v2 at all. T-atsui-suna-R14-v1 flattened all seven declared classes. An independent seat, asked whether the arms state the same things — and having caught 3 of 3 planted factual errors first — returned SAME on 0 of 7 segments, and three of the seven classes were the reason (RS-20260815b §6(i)). They are dropped here, with the auditor's reason against each:

What is left is a purely syntactic manipulation, and that is a sharper instrument than v1 was, not merely a safer one. The three dropped classes are lexical and punctuational; the four that remain are all matters of word order and sentence shape:

A7.1 is excluded, and the exclusion is declared rather than discovered. R29-v1 records it FAILED: the story's first sentence has no subject, English cannot leave a finite main clause subjectless, and the carrying arm therefore does not carry the device there. Flattening a site the carrying arm never carried would put a difference between the arms that is not a carriage difference. v1 flattened it; this version does not, and ¶001 is byte-identical in all three arms.

Everything else is byte-identical to the R29 arm. 71 of the 106 source paragraphs are untouched — against 50 in v1 — and analysis/checks.py asserts it in 507 checks, with 9 of 9 mutation tests caught. Eighteen dropped-class sites sit inside a paragraph the rebuild had to rewrite; they are not exempted, they are asserted to survive in kind, per class: the suspension dash still present, the doubling still verbatim, the held-keyword count unchanged over the same stretch of story.

1,525 words against the R29 arm's 1,485 — a length ratio of 1.0269 (v1's was 1.0215). Flattening lengthens, because stating a manner and naming a withheld subject both cost words; the ratio is registered as a rival (H-LENGTH) in the design rather than suppressed.

contamination: none, on the same basis as the parent artifact, which is the only text this one was written from.

The translation

1

They ran, because there was no walking on it—the sand was savagely scorched and nobody could bear it barefoot for a second.

"Hot, hot!"

"Splendid heat!"

"Race you! Race you! As far as the water—"

Three young men and two girls came bursting out of the bathing huts. They put their feet on the sand and were startled by how hot it was. They jumped up and down repeatedly as they ran down to the water's edge, beside themselves.

"No, no, no! Somebody—"

The girl in the maroon costume screamed. And kicked at the sand for all she was worth. — Young A turned round, opened both arms and took her up as though she weighed nothing.

Seeing this,

"Me too, me too!" cried the other one, the girl in the broad red-and-black stripes, catching hold of young B.

B took her up in both arms as A had, but she was heavy, and there was no prospect of his running freely. He was a man thin enough to be pitied.

B was visibly suffering. Still he would not give in, and tried to keep going with the girl in his arms. But he moved unsteadily now. He lifted his legs, and only his legs, as hugely as a man walking through deep snow, because it was hot. He set them down slowly. He was sweating and groaning.

A and the girl, already at the shore, had turned round and were laughing themselves double at it. "Hey!" called C, the young man who had got there ahead of A, with his head out of the water.

B was in no state to answer.

"It'll be too bad of you if you drop me."

The girl up on B's arms was jeering at poor B. And moving both her legs about rapidly, and striking the man's back repeatedly.

"Do keep still, will you. — Ah, there's no feeling left in the soles of my feet."

"We're never going to bring shoes, so it's this every day, B—"

"Tcha! There's no saving it," B spat out.

"Shall I be a lifeboat, B—"

C kept calling and calling from the water.

"Idiot!" B roared at C. — "Behold the gallant knight—there you are. Once it's come to this I'll not let go of this princess, not over any fire, not in any water—there you are."

When they got to the water's edge at last the girl tumbled off B's arms and swam away to C.

2

"Call that hot?"

"Look at them carrying on—"

"Weaklings, aren't they, the lot of them!"

"What do you make of that modern girl's performance."

"Showing off like that—"

"Let's swim out and pull one of them under by the leg…"

Two men who had brought geisha with them watched the young people at their antics and clicked their tongues.

"So you two aren't going in, then."

"We'll watch—"

"Charming. Right, shall we show you what we're made of?"

"Please do—" said the two geisha, looking away.

"Right!"

The two of them took off their yukata and ran out on to the sand. They smoked, and wound their towels round their heads. They walked with a deliberately unhurried tread. When they had gone four or five yards they both said the same thing at the same moment.

"This is past bearing!"

"How horribly hot!"

No sooner had they said it than they gave a "Wah!", flung away cigarettes and everything, and went tumbling flat out for the water's edge.

"The other lot were a great deal better."

"That one's all mouth, whatever it is."

"I can't stand him!"

The two geisha said this sort of thing to each other.

3

"Come on, up on Daddy's back! You—" the man said to his wife, getting the child up on his back. "You're to walk that far in those sandals."

"Why don't you put yours on too?"

"I'm fine. Now then, ready, sonny? Hold tight to Daddy. I'm going to run like mad. It'll be fun—"

"Isn't that nice, sonny. Horsey, horsey!"

"Here we go, one two three!"

A husband and wife with their child set off at a dead run at that word of command.

Looked at quietly, there was a heat-shimmer like steam burning up off the sand. It was a white plain of sand. It seemed to dry in an instant and to warp back on itself with a crackling sound. — In the corner by the bathing huts a gramophone, wild in its tempo and impatient, was playing jazz.

"Get set!"

"On the mark!"

"Bang!"

A troop of schoolboys sounded it with their mouths and ran off in ones and twos.

"Don't be silly, sandals—"

"They'll be stolen."

"Shoes! They're a nuisance to swim in."

"If you go over it in one go like those schoolboys just did, it's nothing."

"It frightens me somehow, that stretch of sand—"

A party of schoolgirls were getting ready too, saying this sort of thing to each other.

Everyone had gone off, and before long I was the only one left there. I took the thing for a kind of painful stage — on the hot sand! I felt at the same time as though I were setting beside it a figure of my own hurried daily life. That figure was limitless and frantic. It was shrieking and dancing round and round on the hot sand. I ran off into a solemn delusion and stood there vacant.

In any case I had just got ready to go into the water myself. But I saw the shapes of the people ahead of me treading over the scorched sand. Cowardice struck me all at once, and it was as though the spirit to break into a run had been taken out of me.

All the same, a day of this heat is a rare thing. There will not be another all summer!

"Come on out!"

"In one go, jump it—"

"Let's have a look at you running it."

Seeing my friends who had gone on ahead beckoning to me, I went on imagining voices like that.

4

"Row us a boat!"

"Come on, quickly—"

Called like that, I braced myself and leapt out. It seared.

"Hot!" I shouted, and jumped before I could stop myself. Hot! Hot! Hot! There was no possible way of keeping the soles of my feet on the ground!

"This is unbearable!" I shouted again, and tried a long jump. I was beside myself by now. I ran and jumped, jumped and ran, like a runner in the hurdles. — When I looked across, they were all laughing themselves double.

And they called out this and that, teasing.

"Look at the old man, in agonies—"

"Ah-ha-ha… that face!"

"No good, no good, you can't turn back now."

"What a shambling sight, what a spineless creature!"

"A man can't put out a lifeboat."

"Look, isn't that wiggle rather like some sort of dance?"

"Barbaric!"

I had no mouth left to answer with. I was in a state of complete confusion. I had no thought for appearances or for what anyone would say. I twisted my face, bent my legs and swung my arms. I trod a preposterous foxtrot. I was on the point of going dizzy.

"I should have left it alone." — "I should have stayed at home and had a nap!" — "No, no, run harder, it's a desert, it's a desert! A desert whatever happens!"

Blurting out whatever came into my mouth out of sheer misery, humming a march, I kept running flat out.

There were boats floating on the water like leaves, so many of them, so many. There were also the people at the shore, the deep blue sky, the red flags, and the white parasols—and the rest of it. All of it flashed past in front of my eyes like petals.

And,

"He's hot because he doesn't run faster."

"It's all gesture and nothing else, that's the trouble."

"Isn't he just playing the fool?"

"It's because there was a pretty geisha over there, that's why he didn't want to come across, I'm sure of it!"

"That's right, he was giving her sidelong looks the whole time back there!"

"Tcha, I'm getting sick of this!"

Voices like this came raining down from every side, again like petals. I was struck by the illusion of not being able to tell for a moment which was sea and which was land — or so I thought, but it was their jeering from before, left scattered in my ears at the instant when I put on speed and turned a somersault two or three yards short of the water's edge. — But when I dived head first into the water and put my head out again straight away I had forgotten all of it, the thoughts and the words alike, and

"Right, let's go!" I said, and took the oars.

Looking round without meaning to, I could see any number of comic figures running over the white sand with strange steps. — The sand shone so white that the people running looked at times as though they were skating on ice.

Translator's log

Written as this version was built, and frozen before the design that judges it existed. The per-operation record is ../../experiments/E-20260815e-fluent-carriage-2/analysis/build_ff2.py, whose OPS table both builds the arm and declares the census — the two cannot drift apart, which is note (bey) applied to a manipulation instead of to a tally.

What changed against v1, and why each change is a repair and not a preference

• The three lexical/punctuational classes are gone. Not because they are uninteresting — A1 is the largest class in the story at 29 sites and the one the R29 log called the greatest cumulative exposure — but because an independent reader is right that removing them changes what the text says. That is a finding about the devices, not about the auditor. A suspension is not ornament: it withholds a proposition. A tripled word is not emphasis-only: it asserts more. A held keyword is not repetition-for-its-own-sake: varying it moves the degree.
• The manipulation is now one thing. v1 varied lexis, punctuation and syntax together and could not say which a reader was answering to. This version varies syntax alone, with every word of the vocabulary and every mark of the punctuation held. Whatever it measures, it measures about sentence shape.

Where the flattening was hard, and what the difficulty was

• A6, the standalone attribution, is the cheapest class to flatten and the most consequential. Twelve sites, and each one collapses a paragraph break: "Idiot!" / —B roared at C. becomes "Idiot!" B roared at C. The English is ordinary either way. What is lost is the delay — the reader hears the line before learning who spoke — and nothing propositional goes with it. This is the class that most cleanly satisfies the form-only test.
• A5, the piled period, is the class where flattening is least mechanical. Ten sentences in which circumstantials accumulate ahead of a late main verb; breaking each into declaratives in default order means choosing where the joints are, and the choice is the flattener's. The risk is that a break lands somewhere that changes emphasis rather than shape. At ¶094 the piled period runs through an open-ended list — the white parasols—and the rest of it—flashed past — and the break has to fall inside a dash pair belonging to a dropped class. What was taken keeps the list open on its dash and moves the verb into its own sentence; the second dash is not reproduced because the interpolation is no longer medial. That is the one place in this arm where a dropped class is not left bit-for-bit intact, and it is recorded here rather than left to be found.
• A7 is where naming the subject is hardest to do plainly, because English's own resource for withholding is inversion, and undoing an inversion sometimes leaves a sentence with nothing to front: Saying this sort of thing to each other while they got ready was another group again, a party of schoolgirls becomes A party of schoolgirls were getting ready too, saying this sort of thing to each other — which needs a too the original does not have a word for, carrying the もあつた that the existential itself was carrying. Content-neutral, and worth naming as the sort of place where a flattening can quietly become a translation decision.
• A2 was the easiest to flatten and is the one an auditor has already challenged. Six mimetics become generic verb plus stated manner: went hopping → jumped up and down repeatedly; slapping → striking repeatedly. RS-20260815b §8 records a blind auditor's refusal at A2.4 — it held that a single English sound-symbolic verb does not do the work of a reduplicated mimetic. If that refusal is right, then at that site the two arms differ less than the site table says, and the manipulation is weaker there than declared. (A statement about a reader, not a quality claim: internal-judgment-only.) The site is kept and the challenge is carried forward.

What this arm is not

It is not an independent translation. It is derived from R29-v1 and from nothing else, and the derivation is the design. It is also not a zero-carriage arm, which v1 claimed to be: the twenty-nine dashes, the eight reduplications and the eleven tokens of the held keyword are still carried here, exactly as in the R29 arm. The contrast this arm supports is a syntactic dose contrast, not an ablation, and any reading of the numbers that treats it as an ablation is reading more than the arm can bear.