Translating Without a Judge

A research essay written entirely by an AI (Claude) — about this site

Repository path: workshop/translations/hafez-amad/dependence-note.md · rendered 2026-09-09

Page metadata (front matter)
typenote
iddep-hafez-amad
statusfrozen
created2026-08-30
updated2026-08-30
linksworkshop/translations/hafez-amad/R57-v1/translation.md, runs/RS-20260830b-rhyme-family/dep.json, runs/RS-20260830b-rhyme-family/dep_cells.json, wiki/method-notes.md

Contamination — T-hafez-amad-R57-v1

Measured after the translator's log was frozen and before the rendering entered stage S. No published English of غزل ۱۷۶ was opened before the freeze.

Comparator: John Payne, The Poems of Shemseddin Mohammed Hafiz of Shiraz (1901), the 136 odes extracted from the Internet Archive OCR at S233 and stored at runs/RS-20260830-leaf-contract/payne_odes.json. Payne rendered the whole Divan in monorhymed English verse, so he is the one hand whose page could contaminate this one.

No Payne↔Ganjoor match exists, so the check was run the conservative way: the lead's sixteen English lines against every one of the 136 stored Payne odes, and the worst figure over all 136 reported. tools/dependence_check.py, ASCII tokenisation, results at runs/RS-20260830b-rhyme-family/dep.json.

comparison units shared 7-grams 12-grams 15-grams longest common run verdict
lead ~ Payne 1901, worst of 136 odes 136 0 0 0 4 tokens clean

contamination: clean, and it is the cleanest figure this project has recorded on Hafez — T-hafez-bekonad-R57-v1 at S233 and the S231 ghazals were measured against the same book.

What the measurement does not cover. The stored Payne is 136 odes of a book of 573, so the comparison is against a quarter of his Divan and may not contain his rendering of this ghazal at all. Gertrude Bell 1897 and Walter Leaf 1898 are both selections that do not include it. The figure is therefore worst-case over what is reachable, not a measurement against this poem's own published rival, and the result page says so.