Repository path: workshop/translations/flipperne/R07-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-flipperne-R07-v1 — H. C. Andersen, «Flipperne» (1848), fluency

• Source. Hans Christian Andersen, «Flipperne», 1848. Copy-text: the same Danish Wikisource text as the three sibling arms, held in this repository at workshop/experiments/E-20260813g-register-quadrants/corpus/DA.txt — 756 Danish words in 26 paragraphs. Read whole, in Danish, before translating.
• Copy-text defects, carried forward from the sibling artifacts: sprøge for spørge and seeet for seet, both in the collar's first speech; read as the intended words. Single-witness and uncollated.
• Regime. R07 v1.0 (fluency — Venuti's domesticating checklist executed as rules F1–F10, frozen 2026-07-28, sixteen days before this tale entered the project). Dialect declared under F5: British.
• Translator. The lead agent, as a labeled subject (charter §3, A4). Cost $0; not ledgered. The lead does not judge this translation.
• Length. 756 Danish words → 911 English words (ratio 1.205), by whitespace split over the 26 rendered paragraphs, which is the method the R08 artifact used. Siblings by the same method: R08 829 (1.097), R06 873 (1.155), R25 1,070 (1.415). (wc -w gives 905 here and 824 for R08; it does not count a standalone em dash as a word, which is the whole of the difference. The study limb states which counter it uses.)
• Lineage. Fourth rendering of this work in the project, and the arm the shelf was missing. R08 (resistancy) has stood on this tale since earlier today with no R07 beside it, and the R07/R08 pair is the one contrast Venuti's own account names. R06 plain, R25 raised, R08 source-ward, R07 fluent.

Contamination: high, enumerated, and what it forbids

This rendering was made after reading three complete English renderings of the same tale in the same session — T-flipperne-R06-v1, T-flipperne-R25-v1 and T-flipperne-R08-v1, all three by this same hand, all three read whole while the session was choosing its unit. No published hand was opened. That is the worst exposure any translation in this project has declared, and it is declared before the study limb was designed rather than discovered afterwards.

What follows for use, and it is a restriction the study limb is built around.

1. T-flipperne-R07-v1 is not an independent hand and is never a jury arm. It appears in no condition of E-20260813h. Nothing any seat reads is drawn from it.
2. It is used as a declared yardstick and as a fourth point on a formal table, and for nothing else. Both uses are mechanical: token-type overlap computed by a script, and the same frozen compound and inversion sites RS-20260813g coded.
3. The direction of the bias. Two of the three exposures (R06, R25) are domesticating in word-formation and clause order, which is the direction R07's own rules point; the third (R08) is the opposite. Priming therefore pulls this rendering toward the plain pole it was written to occupy, which makes it a more central plain-English yardstick rather than a less central one — and correspondingly makes it a worse witness to what an uncontaminated fluent pass would look like. Where a measurement turns on that, it says so.

Measured, after this log was frozen: the arm's shared 7-gram and 12-gram counts against all sibling arms are reported on the study limb's result page, not here.

The rendering

The Collar

There was once a fine gentleman whose entire household goods came to a bootjack and a comb; but he had the loveliest shirt collar in the world, and it is the collar we are going to hear a story about. He was old enough by now to be thinking of marriage, and so it happened that he went into the wash with a garter.

"Well, I never!" said the collar. "I have never seen anyone so slim and so fine, so soft and so pretty. May I ask your name?"

"I would rather not say," said the garter.

"Where do you come from?" asked the collar.

But the garter was a bashful thing, and thought it rather an odd question to have to answer.

"You must be a belt," said the collar. "A sort of inner belt! I can see you are for use as well as for show, my dear young lady."

"You must not speak to me!" said the garter. "I am sure I have given you no encouragement."

"Oh, when somebody is as lovely as you are," said the collar, "that is encouragement enough."

"Do not come so close to me!" said the garter. "You look so mannish."

"I am a fine gentleman myself!" said the collar. "I have a bootjack and a comb." And that was not true at all — it was his master who had them — but he liked to boast.

"Do not come near me," said the garter. "I am not used to it."

"Prude!" said the collar; and then they were taken out of the wash. They were starched, hung over a chair in the sunshine, and then laid on the ironing board, and the hot iron came along.

"Madam!" said the collar. "My dear little widow! I am getting quite hot. I am turning into somebody else altogether; I am losing every one of my folds; you are burning a hole in me! Oh! I want to marry you."

"Rag!" said the iron, and marched proudly over the collar; for it imagined it was a steam boiler that ought to be out on the railway pulling carriages.

"Rag!" it said.

The collar frayed a little at the edges, and so the scissors came to trim the frayed part away.

"Oh!" said the collar. "You must be a prima ballerina! How you can stretch out your legs! It is the prettiest thing I ever saw. Nobody else could match you."

"I know," said the scissors.

"You deserve to be a countess," said the collar. "All I have is a fine gentleman, a bootjack and a comb — if only I had an earldom!"

"Is he proposing?" said the scissors; for it grew angry, and gave him such a snip that he was discarded.

"I had better propose to the comb. It is remarkable how you have kept all your teeth, my dear young lady," said the collar. "Have you never thought of getting engaged?"

"Well, you might have known," said the comb. "I am engaged to the bootjack."

"Engaged!" said the collar. Now there was nobody left to propose to, and so he pretended to despise the whole business.

A long time went by, and the collar ended up in a bin at the paper mill. There was a large gathering of rags there, the fine ones keeping together and the coarse ones keeping together, just as it should be. They all had a great deal to tell, but the collar had most of all, for he was a thorough braggart.

"I have had a terrible number of sweethearts," said the collar. "I could never get any peace. I was a fine gentleman in those days, and starched too; I had a bootjack and a comb of my own, though I never used them. You should have seen me then — you should have seen me when I lay on my side! I shall never forget my first sweetheart; she was a belt, so fine, so soft and so pretty, and she threw herself into a tub of water for my sake. There was a widow, too, who turned red hot, but I left her standing until she went black. There was the prima ballerina, who gave me the cut I still carry about with me; she was a savage creature. My own comb was in love with me, and lost all her teeth from a broken heart. Yes, I have been through a great deal of that kind of thing. But what I am sorriest about is the garter — the belt, I mean — who went into the tub of water. I have a great deal on my conscience; it is high time I was turned into white paper."

And so he was. All the rags were turned into white paper, and the collar became this very sheet of white paper that we are looking at, the one the story is printed on; and that was because he boasted so dreadfully afterwards about things that had never happened at all. And that is something for us to think about, so that we do not behave in the same way; for we can never be sure that we too may not end up in the rag bin one day and be made into white paper, and have our whole history printed on us, the most secret parts included, and then have to run about telling it ourselves, exactly like the collar.

Translator's log

Frozen 2026-08-13, before the study limb of this session existed as a design. Coverage codes per R07 §5: D a numbered rule names the feature and only one live option satisfies it; P rules bear and two or more live options satisfy them; S no rule bears. A site is logged only where two or more renderings were live while writing. L marks a loss the rule set caused.

The decision that organises the whole rendering, and it is the mirror of R08's

(1) The collar is singular from the first word, and Andersen's plural-to-singular slide is abolished. D (F8, F6), and it is an L. Danish «Flipper» is a plural — the two points of a detachable collar — and Andersen writes it plural ("De vare nu saa gamle", "de tænkte") and then without warning masculine singular ("men han pralede", "saa var han kasseret"). F8 says that where the source is ambiguous, choose one reading and write it, and do not reproduce the ambiguity; F6 says depart from the source's order and number where following it produces English that would be called not quite idiomatic. Only one live option satisfies both: singular throughout, from the title down. The title is "The Collar".

This is the single site where R07 and R08 are furthest apart, and the two logs name it as the organising decision independently and in opposite directions. R08's log records keeping the slide because R1 says reproduce the source's discontinuity. Here it is struck because F8 says resolve it. The loss is exact and is recorded as an L: the tale's oddest grammatical fact becomes invisible, and an English reader of this rendering has no way of knowing it was ever there.

(2) Every compound is englished, and the pair the flirtation turns on is destroyed. D (F4, F2), and it is the largest L in the rendering. Strømpebaand → garter, Livbaand → belt. In Danish these are one compound with the first element swapped — a stocking-band upgraded, in the collar's flattery, to an inward body-band — and the joke is that it is the same word twice. F4 forbids a calque that reads as foreign; F2 prefers the widely used word. "Garter" and "belt" are what English calls these things and they are not the same word, so the collar's manoeuvre survives as a fact and dies as a joke. It propagates to the braggart's closing speech, where "jeg mener Livbaandet" becomes "the belt, I mean" — a correction of a word the reader has no reason to think needed correcting. Live alternatives existed at both sites (a calqued pair; "sash" for the second) and neither survives F4.

(3) The rest of the compound inventory, englished under the same rules. D (F4, F2), with three P's. Bohave → household goods (P: an ordinary English phrase, and "goods" is not a calque of have); Redekam → comb; Strygejern → iron; Strygebrædt → ironing board (P — the ordinary English name happens to be built of the same two elements, so F4 does not bear); Dampkjædel → steam boiler (P, same reason); Papirs-Sax → the scissors; Klude-Selskab → a large gathering of rags; Enkefrue → widow; Kjærestesorg → a broken heart; Vandballe → a tub of water; Grevskab → earldom; mandfolkeagtig → mannish; Pralhans → a thorough braggart; Støvleknægt → bootjack (P — again the ordinary English name, arrived at independently by English, not calqued here).

Papirs-Sax is the one that costs something and it is logged as an L. The Danish names the scissors paper-scissors; "paper scissors" is not English for anything, and F4 and F2 both point at the bare "scissors". The word paper, which quietly prepares the paper mill the collar ends in, is dropped.

(4) No fronted-verb inversion anywhere. D (F6), six sites, none carried. Danish is verb-second, so a fronted adverbial inverts: "nu har jeg aldrig seeet", "saa blev de tagne af Vadsken", "der kom det varme Jern", "saa kom Flipperne i Kasse", "Aldrig glemmer jeg min første Kjæreste", "det er om Flipperne vi skulle høre en Historie". English permits several of these as archaisms, and F1 (current, not archaic) and F6 (idiomatic syntax before close syntax) forbid all of them here: "I have never seen", "they were taken out of the wash", "the hot iron came along", "the collar ended up in a bin", "I shall never forget my first sweetheart", "it is the collar we are going to hear a story about". No live option under F6 keeps any of them.

Where the rules cost the most

(5) The polite «De» is gone, and F4 is why. D (F4, F1), and it is an L the regime causes rather than suffers. Andersen's collar courts in the deferential «De» and the scissors break out of it in contempt — "Frier han!", third person. English has one you, so the baseline is unrecoverable in any regime; but R07 also has to decide what to do with the break, and F1 and F4 push toward "Is he proposing?" as a plain third-person remark rather than anything that signals a switch. The shift survives as a sentence and not as a shift. This is the fourth work in this project whose deference system arrives in English at or near zero, and here the arrival is at zero by rule.

(6) «jeg kommer reent ud af Folderne» resolved to the literal. D (F8), an L. The Danish is at once a statement about a collar being pressed flat and an idiom for losing one's composure. F8 forbids reproducing the ambiguity, so one reading had to be written: "I am losing every one of my folds". The idiom is gone. R08's log records the same site as the one place where a calque held both readings open, which is the clearest single illustration of what the two rule sets buy and spend.

(7) The five calqued idioms of the source arm are all solved. D (F6). "Hvor hører de hjemme?" → "Where do you come from?"; "undseelig af sig" → "a bashful thing"; "noget underligt at svare paa" → "rather an odd question to have to answer"; "Lad være at komme mig saa nær" → "Do not come so close to me"; "det kan intet Menneske gjøre dem efter" → "Nobody else could match you". In each case a close rendering was live and F6 excluded it.

(8) «kasseret» → "discarded". D (F1, F2). "saa var han kasseret". The military sense (a cashiered officer) and the tie to the Kasse he later ends up in are both audible in Danish; "cashiered" is dated (F1) and specialised (F2), so "discarded" is the only live option that satisfies both, and both echoes go.

(9) «første Dandserinde» → "prima ballerina". P (F1, F2, F4). The half-French "première danseuse" fails F4; "leading dancer" was live and satisfies every rule; "prima ballerina" is the current, widely used English name for the rank and reads as English rather than as foreign matter. The rules permit two of these and do not choose between them.

(10) Andersen's punctuation is regularised throughout. D (F7, F9). The stray exclamation mark inside a speech tag ("«O!» sagde Flipperne!") becomes a full stop; the comma-spliced periods of paragraphs 24–26 are broken into English sentences; the em-dashes in the braggart's speech are reduced to two. F9 requires that sentences end and long periods may be broken, and F7 forbids fragments. Andersen's 100-word closing period survives as one sentence because breaking it would have required supplying connectives that change the cadence F9 is about — the one place where F9 and F7 pointed the same way as leaving it alone.

(11) Contractions admitted in dialogue and refused in narration. P (F3, F5). F3 bars slang and dialect but not contraction; F5 requires one dialect held throughout. Both are satisfied either way, so the choice is the translator's: uncontracted forms in dialogue ("I am sure I have given you no encouragement") were taken because the tale's speakers are objects performing gentility, and the uncontracted line is not marked in current British English. Logged as P, not D — no rule chose this.

What is not claimed

Nothing in this log is a quality claim. The rendering is not offered as better or worse than its three siblings at anything, and the losses recorded at (1), (2), (3), (5) and (6) are recorded as consequences of a rule set, not as defects. Where an evaluative word has crept in — "costs something" at (3), "the clearest single illustration" at (6) — it is internal-judgment-only and carries no weight anywhere.

Coverage, over 11 logged decision sites: D 8, P 3, S 0. The zero is the figure worth noticing and it is the one I trust least. R07's ten rules bore on every contested site in this tale, where R08's ten went silent twice — at the deference system and at the particle «jo» — and the intuition behind that asymmetry is that a domesticating rule set is written in terms of the target language's norms and can therefore always say something, while a source-oriented rule set has nothing to say wherever the source carries a category the target lacks.

That intuition is not evidence, and this project has already measured why. RS-20260728e put the same D/P/S codes to a second reader and found that two careful readers do not agree on what a written rule decides, so a coverage rate is not a quantity this route delivers — "neither set of numbers is a measurement" is that page's own sentence. The codes above are therefore a record of what the translator believed while writing, kept because R07 §5 requires it, and not a number anything may be built on. If the asymmetry between the two rule sets is real it will have to be shown some other way.