Repository path: workshop/translations/signal/R04-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09
Page metadata (front matter)
| type | translation |
|---|---|
| id | T-signal-R04-v1 |
| status | frozen |
| created | 2026-07-27 |
| updated | 2026-07-27 |
| translated-by | lead |
| contamination | suspected |
| senses | voice, style-correspondence, accuracy, naturalness, cultural-mediation |
| links | workshop/regimes/R04-lead-close.md, workshop/translations/README.md, wiki/arms/ARM-tierD-repair.md, workshop/experiments/E-20260727-sham-decisions/design.md |
T-signal-R04-v1 — Garshin, «Сигнал», the second paragraph
Source. Всеволод Михайлович Гаршин, «Сигнал» (1887), first published Северный вестник, 1887, кн. I. Russian text from ru.wikisource.org (Сигнал_(Гаршин), raw wikitext), which reproduces az.lib.ru's text after Гаршин В. М., Сочинения: Рассказы. Очерки. Статьи. Письма, М.: Сов. Россия. Public domain (Garshin d. 1888).
Locus. The story's second paragraph, «Семён Иванов был человек больной и разбитый…» through «…офицер своего полка оказался.» — 263 Russian words, the whole of Semyon's backstory in one block. Chosen for scale parity with the Tier D items (references 292–394 English words) and because it is a self-contained narrative unit that can be read without the rest of the story.
Regime. R04 (lead close translation, source-only), v0.1. Cost $0; not ledgered (charter §6, A4).
Why this exists. It is the translation limb of S040's paired unit. The study limb rebuilds the two broken decision rules of the Tier D instrument (ARM-tierD-repair); this translation is the material for E-20260727-sham-decisions, which asks whether the instrument's sham control — "eight quality-neutral free-variation substitutions" — can be constructed without overwriting the translator's own decisions. That question is only answerable on a translation whose decisions are recorded, which is why the passage is translated here rather than borrowed.
Contamination: suspected, and the basis is stated rather than assumed. «Сигнал» has at least one freely reachable published English translation — Thomas Seltzer's Best Russian Short Stories (1917), Project Gutenberg #13437, which lists "THE SIGNAL — V.N. Garshin" in its contents. The comparator was confirmed to exist and to be reachable before this translation was begun, and its text was not opened: the volume was downloaded and only its CONTENTS block and the byte offsets of the string THE SIGNAL were printed. No word of any English «Сигнал» was seen before this page was frozen.
Scope limit, declared. This translation is practice material and instrument material. It is explicitly not an independence measurement and must never be cited as one (CLAUDE.md, §Contamination).
Translation
Semyon Ivanov was a sick and broken man. Nine years ago he had been to the war: he served as an officer's orderly and made the whole campaign with him. He went hungry, and he froze, and he roasted in the sun, and he made marches of forty and fifty versts in the heat and in the frost; there were times when he came under fire too, but, thank God, not one bullet touched him. Once the regiment stood in the front line; for a whole week there was an exchange of fire with the Turks: our line lies there, and across a little hollow the Turkish one, and from morning to evening they keep popping away. Semyon's officer was in the line too; three times a day Semyon carried him a hot samovar and his dinner from the regimental kitchens, from the ravine. He goes over the open ground with the samovar, the bullets whistle, they click on the stones; Semyon is afraid, he cries, and he goes all the same. The officer gentlemen were very pleased with him: they always had hot tea. He came back from the campaign whole, only his arms and legs took to aching. He has had to taste no little grief since then. He came home — his father the old man was dead; there had been a little son in his fourth year — dead too, he was ill in the throat; Semyon was left with his wife, the two of them. The holding did not prosper either, and it is hard to plough the land with swollen arms and legs. Their own village became past bearing for them; they went off to new places to look for luck. Semyon and his wife were on the Line, and in Kherson, and in the Don country; nowhere did they come by any luck. The wife went into service, and Semyon went on tramping as before. Once he had to travel by the machine; at one station he sees — the stationmaster looks somehow familiar. Semyon looks at him, and the stationmaster too peers into Semyon's face. They knew each other: he turned out to be an officer of his own regiment.
Translator's log
Written at translation time. Frozen at the commit that first added this file, before E-20260727-sham-decisions was designed and before any sham substitution existed. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. Every decision below is anchored to an exact, verbatim, unique substring of the translation above, because the study limb measures token overlap against those anchors and a paraphrased anchor would make the measurement unfalsifiable.
| # | anchor (verbatim span in the translation) | the decision |
|---|---|---|
| D1 | a sick and broken man |
«больной и разбитый» — разбитый is "smashed / shattered", used of a body worn out rather than of a mood. Live: broken-down, shattered, used up. Chose broken: the flat two-adjective frame matches the Russian's, and broken-down would push toward the idiom for machinery. |
| D2 | Nine years ago he had been to the war |
Deictic centre. The Russian «Девять лет тому назад» anchors to the moment of telling, not to the narrated past; English narration would normally take nine years before. Kept ago, which puts the reader inside the teller's present. This is the first of several places where the passage's skaz footing was preferred over English narrative default; it is the decision that binds D7, D10, D19 and D23. |
| D3 | an officer's orderly |
«денщик» — a soldier assigned as personal servant to an officer. Live: batman (British-army specific, and it dates the English to a different army), servant, orderly. Chose orderly: army register, not tied to one national army, and does not invite the reader to picture domestic service. |
| D4 | made the whole campaign with him |
«целый поход с ним сделал» — Russian сделать поход is the ordinary collocation. English made the campaign is now archaic-to-marginal; went through the whole campaign is the current idiom. Chose made, because went through imports the sense of enduring it, which the Russian sentence has not said yet — it says it in the next sentence, and saying it twice would flatten the build. |
| D5 | He went hungry, and he froze, and he roasted in the sun, and he made marches of |
The Russian is a chain of bare verbs with the subject stated once and inverted («Голодал он, и мёрз, и…»). English will not carry four bare verbs without a subject. Live: repeat he at every limb (chosen), or use one subject and a comma chain. Repeating the pronoun keeps the four-beat parallel that the Russian's polysyndeton has; the cost is four extra words the Russian does not spend. |
| D6 | there were times when he came under fire too |
«случалось и под пулями бывать» — an impersonal it used to happen over an iterative infinitive. Live: he had been under fire more than once (loses the impersonal), it happened that he was under bullets (keeps it, reads as translationese). Chose there were times when: keeps the iterative and the impersonal footing, gives up the literal bullets in favour of the English collocation under fire — which is then paid back at D10, where the bullets return as themselves. |
| D7 | our line lies there, and across a little hollow the Turkish one |
The narration switches into the present tense here and stays there for two sentences. This is the passage's central voice feature and the source of D8, D10, D19 and D23. Live: normalise to past (what a fluent English narrative would do), or carry the present. Carried the present, on the standing register rule adopted for the Verga long work — where the source's own device is the marked one, an English that removes it has translated the content and not the telling. Also kept the Russian's zero copula across the dash, which English tolerates here. «Цепь» is a skirmish line; line alone, because skirmish line explains. |
| D8 | they keep popping away |
«постреливают» — the prefix-plus-imperfective that means desultory, on-and-off firing, with a shade of the unserious. One English word will not do it. Live: keep up a desultory fire (right sense, wrong register — that is a staff officer's phrase, and the sentence is a peasant's), keep firing (loses the intermittence), keep popping away (chosen: colloquial, intermittent, faintly dismissive). |
| D9 | from the regimental kitchens, from the ravine |
The Russian stacks two bare из phrases in apposition — the kitchens were down in the ravine. Live: subordinate one (from the regimental kitchens down in the ravine), or keep them stacked. Kept them stacked and bare. Same rule as D7: the appositional stacking is the telling. Rejected adding up out of, which would have supplied a direction the Russian leaves to be inferred. |
| D10 | He goes over the open ground with the samovar, the bullets whistle, they click on the stones |
The whole clause chain in the present, asyndetic. «В камни щёлкают» — щёлкать is the sharp click of something small striking something hard. Live: ping, smack, click. Chose click: ping is a twentieth-century sound and would date the prose; smack is too soft-bodied for stone. |
| D11 | Semyon is afraid, he cries, and he goes all the same |
«страшно Семёну, плачет, а сам идёт» — dative-impersonal fear, then two bare verbs, then the emphatic «а сам». Live: he is terrified (stronger than «страшно»), he is frightened, he is afraid. Chose afraid as the plainest. «А сам идёт» has no clean English equivalent — it is "and he, himself, for his own part, goes"; chose and he goes all the same, which buys the concession and loses the reflexive insistence. The dative construction (fear happening to Semyon rather than felt by him) is lost outright; English has no way to keep it here. |
| D12 | The officer gentlemen were very pleased with him |
«Господа офицеры» — the deferential collocation, and it is Semyon's word for them, not the narrator's. Live: the officers (fluent, and deletes the deference), their honours the officers (overshoots into servility the Russian does not have), the officer gentlemen (chosen). This is the decision most likely to read as awkward English, and it was taken deliberately: the deference is the free-indirect marker, and removing it puts the narrator's lens back — the same rule that settled the Verga register rows. |
| D13 | took to aching |
«ломить стало» — ломить is the specific dull wrenching ache in bones and joints, and «стало» marks the onset of a permanent state. Live: began to ache (flat, and began suggests an event), took to aching (chosen: the inceptive plus the habitual). |
| D14 | He has had to taste no little grief since then |
«Немало горя пришлось ему с тех пор отведать». Kept taste — «отведать» is a marked verb, not the neutral испытать, and the metaphor is the sentence's whole content. Kept the litotes no little rather than a great deal of: the Russian understates, and an English that states plainly has changed the speaker. |
| D15 | his father the old man was dead |
«отец старик помер» — three bare nouns and a colloquial verb, no commas. Помер is the peasant form against literary умер. Live: his old father had died (fluent, loses the apposition and the register), his father, the old man, was dead (commas make it parenthetical, which it is not). Chose the bare apposition without commas. |
| D16 | there had been a little son in his fourth year |
«сынишка был по четвёртому году» — diminutive сынишка, and «по четвёртому году» means in his fourth year, i.e. three years old. Live: a little boy of three (accurate, and converts an idiom into an arithmetic result), a little son in his fourth year (chosen). Kept son over boy because the diminutive is on the kinship word. |
| D17 | he was ill in the throat |
«горлом болел» — instrumental of the part affected; almost certainly diphtheria, which the Russian does not name. Live: he had died of his throat, of a throat illness, he was ill in the throat (chosen). Refused to name the disease: supplying a diagnosis is exactly the kind of help this register does not ask for. |
| D18 | the two of them |
«сам-друг» — an archaic-folk dual meaning just the pair of them. No English word. Live: alone together, just the two of them, the two of them (chosen — the flattest, and it takes the position the Russian idiom takes). The folk-archaic colour is lost; the sham constraint "no archaising" would forbid recovering it anyway, which is noted here because it will matter to the study limb. |
| D19 | it is hard to plough the land with swollen arms and legs |
Tense again: the Russian generalises into a timeless present inside a past narrative («трудно… землю пахать»). Carried the present, as at D7. «Пухлыми» is puffy/swollen — chose swollen over puffy, which in English is a face word. |
| D20 | Their own village became past bearing for them |
«Пришлось им в своей деревне невтерпёж» — a construction that is not quite grammatical in literary Russian either; невтерпёж is an adverb of unbearability with no subject. Live: they could bear their own village no longer (fluent, and straightens a sentence the Russian leaves bent), became past bearing (chosen — awkward in the same place). |
| D21 | to look for luck |
«Счастье», first of two occurrences. In peasant idiom it is luck / fortune rather than happiness; in a literary register it would be happiness. Chose luck. |
| D22 | nowhere did they come by any luck |
«Счастье», second occurrence, and the decision is that it is rendered identically to D21 so that the repetition survives. The alternative (vary it for English comfort) would have deleted the only thing the two sentences have in common. Also kept the fronted negative with inversion, matching the Russian's «нигде… не». |
| D23 | Once he had to travel by the machine |
«Пришлось ему раз по машине ехать» — «машина» is the peasant word for the railway train. Live: by rail, by train, by the machine (chosen). The word is a class marker; naturalising it makes the sentence narratorial. The risk is that an English reader takes it for an error, and the mitigation is the next clause (at one station), which recovers it. This is the passage's highest-cost decision and it is the same trade as D12. |
| D24 | he sees — the stationmaster looks somehow familiar |
Present tense again, and «начальник» here is the station master, which the Russian leaves to context. Supplying stationmaster is a gloss, and it was taken because the bare chief / superior would send an English reader to the wrong referent entirely — a mistranslation, not a compression. Recorded as an inconsistency with D9/D17, where glosses were refused: what separates them is that this one prevents a wrong reading rather than supplying a convenience. |
| D25 | he turned out to be an officer of his own regiment |
«офицер своего полка оказался» — «своего» is ambiguous between Semyon's own regiment and the officer's own; in context they are the same regiment, so the ambiguity is harmless in Russian and must be resolved in English. Chose his own, which reproduces the ambiguity rather than resolving it. |
Not decided, recorded as such. Versts left untransliterated-and-unconverted with no gloss; the Line, Kherson, the Don country likewise. These followed the standing project practice without a live alternative being weighed, and are logged here so the study limb does not count them as decisions.
Contamination measurement
Run and appended after the freeze commit 92bd3b6, which contains the translation and the log above; the order — translate blind, freeze, then measure — is in the git history rather than asserted. Comparator: Thomas Seltzer, "The Signal", in Best Russian Short Stories (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1917), Project Gutenberg #13437. Instrument: tools/dependence_check.py, unmodified. Cells and raw output in workshop/experiments/E-20260727-sham-decisions/contamination/.
| cell | comparator | words | shared 7-grams | shared 12-grams | longest common run |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | Seltzer 1917, "The Signal" | 3,524 | 0 | 0 | 6 tokens |
| B — null control | Seltzer 1917, the volume's other eighteen stories | 88,012 | 0 | 0 | 4 tokens |
The 6-token run is marches of forty and fifty versts (against «переходы делал по сорока и пятидесяти вёрст»); the control's 4-token run is in the sun and. The A-cell run is two numerals, a conjunction, a preposition, and a transliterated unit of distance that has no English alternative — the shape E-20260726b-forced-or-borrowed calls forced: there is no other way to write it.
Reading, at the strength the numbers support. Cell B is the chance floor for this pairing, and it is measured over a corpus twenty-five times larger than the comparator — same translator, same volume, same period, same register, different sources. It returns 4. Cell A returns 6, over material a fraction of the size. Against the project's measured range for lead translations — 0 tokens (Ovid) to 21 (Turgenev, canonical) — this sits at the clean end, and no run reaches the ≥12-token criterion in either cell.
What this does not do. It does not clear contamination: suspected, and the front matter is unchanged. One comparator, and an obscure one: the better-known English «Сигнал» renderings were not freely reachable here, so this bounds contamination from one side only — exactly the limitation RS-20260727-longwork-selection §1 recorded for Verga. What it licenses is the narrow statement the study limb actually needs: no verbatim borrowing from the one reachable comparator is detectable in this passage, so the twenty-five logged decisions are decisions rather than recollections.