Repository path: workshop/translations/julgast/R06-gate-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-julgast-R06gate-v1 — Lagerlöf, «En julgäst», opening (the contamination gate unit)

Source. Selma Lagerlöf, «En julgäst», in Osynliga länkar (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1894), read from Project Runeberg's proofread electronic edition (runeberg.org/osynliga/01.html, set from the eleventh printing, 1922, proofread against Bonnier 1909). Public domain: Lagerlöf died 1940. Paragraphs 1–3, 216 Swedish words. The project's fifteenth source language's second appearance and its second Swedish work.

Regime. R06 — lead, source-only, single pass, no return pass. Purpose was not declared for this unit: it exists to run the contamination gate (note (bcd)) before the R11 pair's locus is selected, and a gate unit written under a declared purpose would not be measuring what the pair will be measured on.

Why this unit exists. E-20260801g §3.4. Note (bcd) requires the lead's contamination on candidate material to be measured before a locus is chosen and before the studied text is translated — a selection gate, not a flag. The order is S050's: unit A translated, gate run, unit B chosen afterwards and beyond unit A's span.

Contamination: high, ON A MEASUREMENT — and this work was DISCARDED as a limb because of it. tools/dependence_check.py, unmodified, against the whole of Pauline Bancroft Flach's "A Christmas Guest" (Invisible Links, 1899; Project Gutenberg #14273; 2,873 words). The comparator's body was never read — extraction by script, counts only printed (note (bdn)).

E-20260801g §3.4 V3 was frozen before the translation: "if the gate returns a longest common run ≥ 12 tokens or ≥ 1 shared 12-gram, the work is discarded as a limb." Both legs fire. «En julgäst» was discarded, and the R11 pair was built on a different work whose gate came back clean. This artifact stands as the gate's record and as practice; it is not admissible as an independence measurement of anything.

The three nulls are the (bgf) construction — the same translator, the same 1899 volume, the same year and publisher, on stories whose content the lead never rendered. They come back at 3–4 tokens and zero shared 7-grams, which removes "period English resembles period English" as the explanation and localises the overlap to shared content. Where in the text it sits, and what may and may not be concluded from that, are in RS-20260801g-purpose-row — this page records the number and the discard, not an interpretation of them.

Priming: none declared. No English rendering of this story, or of any Lagerlöf, was read before this translation and its log were frozen. The comparator's story titles were listed (a scripted all-caps heading scan) in order to find which stories the 1899 volume covers; no line of its prose reached the transcript.

The translation

One of those who lived the cavalier life at Ekeby was little Ruster, who could transpose music and play the flute. He was of low birth and poor, with no home and no kin. Hard times came upon him when the company of cavaliers was broken up.

He no longer had horse and gig then, no fur coat, no red-painted provision box. He had to travel on foot from farm to farm, and carried his pack knotted up in a blue-striped cotton handkerchief. He buttoned his coat right up under the chin, so that nobody need know how things stood with his shirt and his waistcoat, and in its wide pockets he kept his dearest possessions: the flute unscrewed into its pieces, the flat pocket-flask, and the music pen.

His trade was copying out music, and had everything been as it was in the old days he would not have wanted for work. But with every passing year music was less practised up there in Värmland. The guitar with its rotted silk ribbon and its worn pegs, and the dented French horn with its faded tassels and cords, were carried up to the junk-loft, and the dust lay an inch thick over the long iron-bound violin cases. But the less little Ruster had to do with the flute and the music pen, the more he had to see to the pocket-flask, and in the end he became an outright drunkard. It was a great shame about little Ruster.

Translator's log

Frozen with the translation, before any evaluation of it was designed and before the R11 pair's locus was selected. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims (R06 §3).

1. kavaljersliv på Ekeby — "the cavalier life at Ekeby". Left unglossed. The Swedish reader of 1894 had Gösta Berlings saga (1891) behind this and knew what Ekeby was; an English reader does not. Alternatives live: "the roistering life of the Ekeby pensioners"; a gloss. Deliberately not resolved here, because this is the gate unit and the pair's whole question is what a declared purpose does to sites of exactly this kind — resolving it under no declared purpose would have spent the site.
2. den lille Ruster — "little Ruster", holding the definite adjective across all four of its occurrences in the unit. Swedish carries the affectionate-diminutive weight in the article-plus-adjective; English can only repeat the epithet.
3. karriol — "gig". A karriol is a light one-horse two-wheeled trap; "gig" is the nearest English vehicle and is not the same vehicle. "Carriole" exists in English and would have been copy-opaque.
4. rödmålat matsäcksskrin — "red-painted provision box". A matsäcksskrin is the painted travelling food-chest of Swedish rural gentry; "provision box" keeps the function and loses the object.
5. lomflaskan — "the pocket-flask", twice. Dialectal lomma = pocket; the flask is flat because it rides in a coat pocket, which the following clause needs. "Hip flask" was rejected as too modern in register.
6. den isärskruvade flöjten — "the flute unscrewed into its pieces". One Swedish participle, four English words; the alternative "the dismantled flute" loses the screw joints, which are what make it fit the pocket.
7. den skräpiga vinden — "the junk-loft". Skräpig is "littered, full of rubbish"; a vind is the attic under the roof. "The lumber-room" was the other candidate and is more idiomatic English at the cost of the roof.
8. valthornet — "the French horn". Literally valthorn = hunting/valve horn; the English instrument name is French horn and carries a nationality the Swedish does not have. Recorded because it is a false friend of the transparent kind — the calque "wald horn" would have been opaque.
9. Det var stor synd om den lille Ruster. — "It was a great shame about little Ruster." Synd om is the ordinary Swedish idiom of pity, not of sin; "a great pity" was the alternative and is flatter. The sentence is the narrator stepping forward, and both options keep that.
10. tumstjockt — "an inch thick". A tum is a thumb's-breadth and was a real pre-metric Swedish unit; English "inch" is the same measure conversion the project catalogued at A-garnett-vanka (пудового → "forty-pound"). Silent by design, and named here so it is not silent in the record.

No sentence in this log is a quality claim about the rendering.