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

«Menuet» — gate span, R06 (lead single pass), v1

What this is. The contamination gate unit of note (bcd), translated before the locus of the real pair was selected and before any line of the locus was rendered. Its only function is to be measured against the whole of a published English rendering of the same story; the numbers decide whether the work may host a limb at all. It is not part of any scored item.

Source. Guy de Maupassant, «Menuet» (1882), in Contes de la bécasse, Paris: V. Havard, 1894, pp. 69–80. Text from French Wikisource (validated transcription of the Havard 1894 djvu), stored at workshop/canon/menuet/source-fr.txt. Public domain (Maupassant d. 1893).

Gate span = paragraphs 0–3 of the story proper, 265 French words — Jean Bridelle's preamble about which griefs heal and which do not. Disjoint from the locus (paragraphs 24–41), which was chosen only after this gate returned.

Regime. R06 v1.0 — read the source, write once, stop. No return pass.

Translated by the lead agent as a labeled subject, in session, at no API cost. The lead never judges its own translation (charter §5).

Contamination: none, measured — figures in ## Gate measurement below. No published rendering of «Menuet» into any language was read before this file was frozen, and none has been read since: the comparator was fetched to a scratch path outside the repository by script, consumed by tools/dependence_check.py as a token stream, and never displayed. Logged in wiki/base/consulted.md.

The translation

Great misfortunes hardly sadden me, said Jean Bridelle, an old bachelor who passed for a sceptic. I have seen war at very close quarters: I stepped over the bodies without pity. The large brutalities of nature or of men can wring cries of horror or of indignation out of us, but they never give us that pinch at the heart, that shiver down the back that comes at the sight of certain small heartbreaking things.

The most violent pain a person can feel is certainly a mother's loss of a child, and a man's loss of his mother. That is violent, terrible; it overturns and tears; but one recovers from such catastrophes as one recovers from broad bleeding wounds. Whereas certain encounters, certain things half-glimpsed or guessed at, certain secret sorrows, certain treacheries of fate, which stir up in us a whole painful world of thoughts, which push suddenly ajar before us the mysterious door of the moral sufferings — complicated, incurable, the deeper for seeming slight, the more stinging for seeming almost impalpable, the more stubborn for seeming got up — leave behind in the soul something like a trail of sadness, a taste of bitterness, a sense of disenchantment that we are a long time ridding ourselves of.

I have always before my eyes two or three things that others would assuredly not have noticed, and that went into me like long thin punctures that will not heal.

Perhaps you would not understand the feeling these quick impressions left in me. I shall tell you only one of them. It is very old, but as alive as yesterday. It may be that my imagination alone has borne the whole cost of my tenderness.

Translator's log

Written as the draft was written; frozen with it. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims.

• G1 — un vieux garçon. Idiomatic for a confirmed bachelor, not "an old boy". Took an old bachelor; a confirmed bachelor was live and was left because the French does not have the note of chosen principle that confirmed carries.
• G2 — qui passait pour sceptique. Who passed for a sceptic keeps the French idiom's shape and its faint suggestion that the reputation may be wrong — which the story then confirms. Who had a reputation for scepticism was the flatter option and was not taken.
• G3 — j'enjambais les corps sans apitoiement. The imperfect is habitual: he did this repeatedly. English simple past I stepped over the bodies loses the iterative; I used to step over recovers it and lengthens the clause past the clipped soldier's tone. Kept the simple past; the loss is recorded.
• G4 — the long period in paragraph 2. One French sentence of 96 words with three parallel d'autant plus … qu'elles semblent … clauses. Kept as one English sentence with the three comparatives em-dashed out as an interpolation, so that the subject (certaines rencontres …) and the verb (nous laissent) still meet. Splitting into three sentences was the obvious naturalising move and was refused: the sentence's exhausting length is the point of it.
• G5 — factices. Artificial, contrived, got up. Took got up, which is period-plausible and keeps the sneer; contrived is the safer and more modern word.
• G6 — souffrances morales. Not moral suffering in the ethical sense — nineteenth-century French moral opposes physique. Mental sufferings is the accurate gloss and loses the period. Kept the moral sufferings, on the judgement that the surrounding clauses disambiguate.
• G7 — attendrissement. No single English word: the softening of feeling, being moved to tenderness. Took tenderness and let borne the whole cost carry the rest of the idiom (avoir fait les frais de).

Gate measurement

tools/dependence_check.py, unmodified, run by workshop/experiments/E-20260802c-regime-scoring/materials/gate.py on the frozen text above against the whole of the anonymous English "Minuet" in Original Short Stories vol. 10 (Project Gutenberg #3086; M. Walter Dunne edition, 1903, public domain), plus three null cells against three other stories in the same volume by the same translator — a floor the lead did not write and cannot game, which also kills the "period English resembles period English" explanation (note (bgf)).

Discard rule, frozen before the measurement: longest common run ≥ 12 tokens, or ≥ 1 shared 12-gram, and the work is discarded as a limb.

Result: the gate FIRED and «Menuet» was DISCARDED as a limb.

The run is "bridelle an old bachelor who passed for a sceptic i have seen war at" — fourteen consecutive tokens, of which one is the character's name. The nulls are the same anonymous translator on three other stories in the same volume, and they return 2–3 tokens and zero shared 12-grams, so "period English resembles period English" is measured here and does not explain it.

Nothing above is a claim that the translation is bad, and nothing about it is repaired by rewriting. What the number says is that this text is not independent of a published English rendering, and therefore that this work cannot host a limb whose value depends on the lead having translated it rather than recalled it. The discard rule was frozen before the measurement and was not revisited after it fired. Raw figures: workshop/experiments/E-20260802c-regime-scoring/materials/gate-result.json.