Repository path: workshop/translations/zapiski-oct3/R19-v4/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-zapiski-oct3-R19-v4 — the same paragraph, specification A′: the five named carriers moved under an edit budget

• Source. Identical to T-zapiski-oct3-R19-v1.
• Regime. R19 v1.0. Specification A′ — MOVE K1–K5, HOLD K6, under a hard budget of at most TEN edited sites. Single pass, no revision.
• Why this member exists. It was not in the frozen design. The independent pre-run critic's finding 6 (BLOCKING) is that A and B are not parallel manipulations — A rewrites 70.1% of the baseline's tokens and B 4.0% — so the primary as frozen compared a heavy rewrite with a light one rather than five carriers with one. The critic's fix (b) was: re-specify A to match B's extent of change. This member is that fix, attempted honestly and reported whether or not it worked. Written after the critic returned and before any other call was dispatched; critic.md records the ordering.
• Dialect: British English, as C. Drafted from C and the Russian, with C's propositional inventory in view (R19 Q4) — not an independent second translation.
• Translated by the lead agent, in session. Cost $0; not ledgered.

Today an extraordinary thing happened to me. I got up rather late, and when Mavra brought in my boots, cleaned, I asked what the time was. Hearing that ten had struck long ago, I dressed in a great hurry. It must be admitted that I would not have gone in to the department at all, knowing in advance the sour face our section head would pull. He has been at me for ages: "What is this muddle you always have in your head, my dear fellow? Sometimes you tear about like a scalded cat, you get a case into such a tangle that Satan himself could not unpick it, you write a title with a small letter, you leave off the date and the number." The man is a heron. He is jealous, no doubt, that I sit in the Director's own study and trim the quills for His Excellency. In short, I would not have gone in at all but for the hope of an interview with the treasurer, and of obtaining something from that Jew, some part of my salary in advance. He is a creature of a certain description. That he should ever pay out a month's money before the day — the Last Judgment will come sooner; a petitioner may ask to the point of rupture, or be in the extremity of need, and he will not part with it, grey devil that he is. And at home his own cook slaps his face. The whole world knows it. I cannot see what there is to be got out of serving in a department. No resources of any kind. Now the provincial board, the civil and treasury chambers — that is quite another matter. There one may observe a man established in a corner and scribbling away, whose coat is a wretched one and whose countenance provokes disgust, and yet the country house he takes is of quite another order. A gilt porcelain cup is not to be offered to such a person: "That," he says, "is a present for a doctor." What he wants is a pair of trotters, or a droshky, or a beaver worth three hundred roubles. His demeanour is of the mildest and his address of the most delicate — "Lend me your little knife, I must mend my pen" — and then he cleans a petitioner out and leaves him standing in his shirt. Still, our service is a noble one; there is a cleanliness about everything that the provincial board will never see in its life: mahogany desks, and every chief speaking to you politely. It must be admitted that but for the nobility of the service I should have left the department long ago.

Translator's log

Frozen before any evaluation of this triple-plus-one was designed; stages 1–4 had not been dispatched when this was written. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims.

The ten sites, exhaustively

Ten sites, the budget exactly. K6 was not touched at any of them: the man still presumes envy in his chief, still calls the errand an interview rather than a beggary without noticing the difference, still denounces the provincial clerk without connecting it to himself, and still asserts the nobility of the service flatly.

What the budget could and could not buy — and this is the answer to the critic's finding 6

Three of the five moved; two did not, and could not.

• K4 idiosyncrasy moved most cheaply of anything in this experiment. A narrator's tics are located — four interjections and one repetition, five sites, and they are gone. Idiosyncrasy is the one named carrier that behaves like a list of places.
• K5 distance moved cheaply too, because in this passage it is carried by a countable thing: second-person address and imperatives. Six of them, five edits, and the reader is out of the room.
• K1 register moved partially. Nine of the ten sites lift locally, and the paragraph is still mostly C's vocabulary. A register is a property of a distribution of words, and ten sites do not shift a distribution of 433.
• K2 rhythm barely moved. Two sentences were joined. The passage's paratactic lurch is a property of every sentence boundary in it, and there are far more than ten.
• K3 temperature moved least of all, and the reason is worth stating. The concrete and bodily words in this paragraph are not clustered at ten sites; they are the paragraph — boots, a sour face, a scalded cat, a heron, bursting, a slapped face, spitting, a shirt. To cool the diction is to replace all of them, which is what A did, and it cannot be approximated.

So the non-parallelism the critic found is not an accident of how A was written. Two of the five named carriers are distributed properties that no small edit can move, and the property the entry omits is movable at eight sites. That asymmetry is a fact about the carriers, and it is now on record from the translator's side before any reader was asked anything. (internal-judgment-only)