Repository path: workshop/translations/bettelweib-locarno/R04m-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-bettelweib-locarno-R04m-v1 - the length-matched variant

Regime: R04m, and it is deliberately NOT a numbered regime. It is defined in E-20260728c-length-matching section 2 and nowhere else, and no page for it exists in workshop/regimes/. One live outcome of the experiment that produced it is that a length-matched arm must never be used as a control; promoting it to the regime shelf would be building the thing the result may forbid. If a later session wants it, it constitutes it then, with a reason.

Definition. Take T-bettelweib-locarno-R04-v1 and bring its word count to exactly that of T-bettelweib-locarno-R06-v1 (407), changing as little as possible and never changing anything for any reason other than the count.

Source: workshop/canon/bettelweib-locarno/source.txt. Derived from: T-bettelweib-locarno-R04-v1, frozen at 8173070 before this pass began. Translated by: the lead agent. No API call; cost $0; not ledgered. Priming: as the draft and the revision - no English rendering of this story was ever read. This text is additionally primed by construction on its own free revision, which is what the design says a real matched-control procedure does: you write the arm, then you match it. Contamination: suspected, UNMEASURED - identical basis to the other two artifacts. Evaluation: none, and none is possible under this design.

Translation

At the foot of the Alps, near Locarno in upper Italy, there stood an old castle belonging to a marchese, which one now sees lying in rubble and ruin as one comes from the St. Gotthard; a castle with high and spacious rooms, in one of which an old sick woman, who had presented herself begging at the door, had once been bedded down by the lady of the house, out of pity, on straw shaken out beneath her. The marchese, who on his return from the hunt happened to step into the room where he used to set down his gun, ordered the woman crossly to get up out of the corner where she lay and to take herself off behind the stove. The woman, as she raised herself, slipped with her crutch on the smooth floor and injured her back in a dangerous way; so that she did indeed still get to her feet with unspeakable effort and go right across the room, as directed: but behind the stove she sank down, with groaning and moaning, and died.

Several years afterwards, when the marchese had fallen, through war and failed harvests, into alarming financial straits, a Genoese knight presented himself, who wished to buy the castle from him for its beautiful situation. The marchese, to whom the sale mattered a great deal, instructed his wife to lodge the stranger in the empty room mentioned above, very handsomely and comfortably furnished. But how taken aback the couple were when the knight came down to them in the middle of the night, distraught and pale, swearing by all that was holy that the room was haunted: that something which had been invisible to the eye had risen, with a noise as though it had been lying on straw, in the corner of the room, had walked with audible steps, slowly and infirmly, right across the room, and had sunk down behind the stove with groaning and moaning.

The marchese, alarmed — he did not himself rightly know why — laughed the knight out of it with an affected cheerfulness, and said he would get up at once and spend the night with him in the room to set his mind at rest. But the knight begged the favour of being allowed to pass the night in an armchair in the marchese's own bedroom; and when morning came he ordered the horses harnessed, took his leave, and departed.

Translator's log

Frozen before the diff was computed. Continues the numbering of the other two artifacts. Every entry records the count it moved, because under this regime the count is the only admissible reason for an edit.

D30 - the target and the rule. Free revision 421 words, draft 407, so 14 words must go. The rule followed: find the places where words can be shed with the least loss to what the sentence says, take them in order of least loss, and stop at 14. No edit was made for any other reason - no wording was improved, no accuracy repaired, nothing re-read against the German except to check that a proposed cut lost nothing the German insists on.

D31 - on straw that was shaken out beneath her -> on straw shaken out beneath her (-2). A reduced relative. Nothing is lost: the participle carries the same agentless passive that D6 and D7 were protecting.

D32 - where he was in the habit of setting down his gun -> where he used to set down his gun (-4, net -3 after used to set replaces was in the habit of setting). pflegte is habitual and both renderings carry it. The relative clause D17 restored is kept; only the predicate inside it contracts.

D33 - the corner in which she lay -> the corner where she lay (-1). D18 restored the relative clause against the draft's the corner she was lying in; where keeps the clause and costs one word.

D34 - as she had been directed -> as directed (-3). The largest single cut. wie es ihr vorgeschrieben war names the person to whom the thing was prescribed, and as directed drops her. This is a real loss and it was taken for the count, which is exactly what the regime requires and exactly what makes the regime worth measuring.

D35 - for the sake of its beautiful situation -> for its beautiful situation (-3). wegen is carried by the bare for, more weakly.

D36 - in the empty room mentioned above, which was very handsomely and comfortably furnished -> ..., very handsomely and comfortably furnished (-2). A reduced relative again; the German has a full one (das ... eingerichtet war), so the syntactic match with the source is weakened while the content is not.

D37 - one cut was made and then REVERSED, and it is recorded because it is the most informative entry in this log. The first assembly also cut that something which had been invisible to the eye to that something invisible to the eye (-3), which brought the total to 17 and the text to 404 - three words past the target. Something had to go back. The edit chosen for restoration was the one with the largest loss: das dem Blick unsichtbar gewesen is a perfect participle, and dropping which had been drops the tense that says the thing had been invisible until now. Restoring it returned the count to exactly 407.

What that entry shows, and it was not anticipated by the design. The restored wording is the draft's wording. So the matching pass reached a state in which it was holding a reversion to the draft, and then gave it up - not for any reason of meaning, but because the arithmetic overshot. Whether a matched arm reverts toward the draft is therefore partly a matter of how the trim happens to land, which is a property of the count and not of the translation. The diff that was computed afterwards is of the text as it stands, with D37 restored.

D38 - the doublet constraint of D11 and D29 re-checked. with groaning and moaning occurs twice and neither occurrence was touched by any cut. Verified by string comparison.