Repository path: workshop/translations/max-havelaar-i-b/R18-v2/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-max-havelaar-i-b-R18-v2 — the same 521 words, under R18 specification B

• Source. Identical extent to T-max-havelaar-i-b-R18-v1: Multatuli, Max Havelaar ch. I ¶7–9, 521 Dutch words, same frozen file, same sha256.
• Regime. R18 v1.0. Specification B — the man who knows (E-20260805d/design.md §2.1). Single pass, no revision.
• Written second of the pair, from the Dutch, with R18-v1's propositional inventory in view — which R18 P5 requires and P4 as first drafted forbade. See §The dependence declared below.
• Dialect: British English, as in the pair's other member.
• Translated by the lead agent, in session. Cost $0; not ledgered (charter §3, A4).
• No published rendering of this text into any language was read before this text and its log were frozen.

Translation

Verse is not the only thing that trains the young in untruth. Go into the theatre one evening and attend to the lies that are there disposed of over the counter. The hero of the piece, having gone into the water, is fished out of it by a gentleman who is himself on the point of bankruptcy; whereupon that gentleman makes him a present of half his fortune. It cannot be true. When my own hat blew into the water on the Prinsengracht the other day — Frits says was blown — the man who brought it back to me received a ten-cent piece, and went away satisfied; and though I grant you that a man who had fished out not the hat but the head beneath it would have earned something more, he would not have earned half my fortune. Work the thing out and you will find that on those terms a man need fall in only twice to be a pauper. And the worst of these exhibitions is not the lie itself but what the lie does to the house: it grows accustomed, it grows fond, and at the last it applauds. There are evenings when I could wish the whole pit in the canal, simply to learn which of them had meant it. I am a friend of truth, and I give notice accordingly: for the fishing-up of my person I decline to pay any such salvage as that. Whoever finds the terms too low is at liberty to leave me lying. On a Sunday I might go a little higher, for on a Sunday I have on my gold watch-chain, and another coat.

The stage ruins more of them than the novels do, and for a reason anybody can see: it is there in front of you. Give a man a little tinsel and a little lace punched out of paper and the whole thing becomes inviting — to children, that is, and to persons not in business. Even where these theatre people undertake to show us poverty they contrive to lie about it. The father has gone bankrupt; the daughter works to keep the family; very good. She sits there with her sewing, or her knitting, or her embroidery — and now, if you please, count the stitches she gets through in the course of an entire act. She talks; she sighs; she goes to the window; work she does not. A family that can live upon that labour does not need much. This girl is naturally the heroine. She has thrown several seducers down the stairs, she cries out at intervals "oh my mother, oh, my mother!", and she therefore represents Virtue. And what is one to call a virtue that requires a whole year for a pair of woollen stockings? I ask whether all this does not give false notions of virtue, and of "working for one's bread". Nonsense and lies, the whole of it.

Then the first lover — a clerk at the copy-book once, and now enormously rich — returns all at once, and marries her. Lies again. Men with money do not marry girls out of bankrupt houses. And if you tell me that on the stage the thing may be allowed to pass as an exception, my objection is not answered: the people's sense of truth is spoiled, for a people takes the exception for the rule; and public morality is undermined, for it is taught to applaud upon the stage what every respectable broker or merchant holds to be a ridiculous madness in the world. When I married there were thirteen of us in my father-in-law's office — Last & Co — and I can tell you there was business doing.

Translator's log — what specification B changed, and what it could not

The pair's shared decisions (the waaide correction, the coin, the salvage term, the purl chain, the bankrupt house, the italics) are logged once, in R18-v1. This log records only where the person forced a different English for the same proposition, which is the pair's whole content.

What specification B could not change, and this is the finding the log exists to record. Three things resisted:

• The italics. stage / world / I are Multatuli's, they carry the passage's argument, and a person who dropped them would be asserting less. Both members keep all of them.
• The exclamation in ¶8's list. «Het is zoo aanschouwelyk!» wants an exclamation mark. B is not allowed one there, so the emphasis had to move into the sentence's shape instead — which is compensation of exactly the kind framework/v0.1 R1 describes, arrived at here from the persona side rather than the marking side, and unprompted by it.
• The refusal to pay salvage. It is already a joke in the Dutch, already delivered with a straight face, and already timed. B could not improve it and A could not spoil it. The one site in 521 words where the two persons converge on nearly the same English is the site where Multatuli had already done the work.

The dependence declared

R18-v2 was drafted from the Dutch with R18-v1 open beside it, because R18 P5's content-parity rule cannot be satisfied otherwise. Consequences, stated rather than left to be inferred:

1. This is not an independent second translation and no part of E-20260805d treats it as one.
2. Where the two members share English wording, that is carryover, not convergence, and it may not be read as two translators agreeing.
3. The pair's evidential content is a within-translator contrast: one person's prose against another person's prose, with content and translator held fixed. That is what the design asks of it and it is not licensed for more.

Contamination — the gate, run after both members and both logs were frozen

Measured with tools/dependence_check.py, unmodified, against Baron Alphonse Nahuÿs, 1868 (Project Gutenberg #70128), whole of chapter I, 2,105 tokens, extracted mechanically by paragraph index and never displayed to the translator. The comparator's paragraphing is coarser than the Dutch, so a paragraph-aligned extent cannot be cut; the whole chapter is used, which makes every count below an upper bound.

The 14-token run is "and he was satisfied i know very well that i ought to have given" — flat declarative English for flat declarative Dutch, the niewola-tatarska shape, and it sits at the site where R18-v1 follows the source's clause order most closely.

Same source, same translator, same afternoon, and changing the declared person took the overlap to zero. Nothing here was designed to measure that; the reading is in RS-20260805d-two-persons §9, and no claim is registered on it.

contamination: suspected on both members, inherited from the S077 measurement on this work and this translator (17-token longest run, 13 shared 12-grams, 0 excluding names) and not lowered by anything here. No published rendering enters E-20260805d: every text a seat reads is the Dutch or one of the three English texts produced inside the run, so the design's validity does not turn on independence from Nahuÿs.