Repository path: workshop/translations/zhongli/R04-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

蒲松齡〈種梨〉 — lead close translation (R04)

Source. 蒲松齡《聊齋志異》卷一〈種梨〉, 575 characters entire, from zh.wikisource.org (聊齋志異/第01卷), saved verbatim at workshop/experiments/E-20260816g-device-function/materials/zhongli-zh.txt. The project's second work from this collection; the first was 〈促織〉 (T-cuzhi-R04-v1, S073).

Regime. R04 v1.0 — lead close translation, source only, draft then self-revision. The draft is frozen separately as T-zhongli-R06-v1, committed at aaf5697 before this revision began, per R04 §Procedure 2a.

Lineage. T-zhongli-R06-v1 → this. Seventeen substitutions, applied from the written list in §Revision below so the diff is auditable rather than described.

Cost. $0. Lead translation is free and is never ledgered (charter §3, A4).

Contamination: declared suspected at freeze, MEASURED clean afterwards. Giles's 1880 rendering ("Planting a Pear-tree", Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio) is freely readable on Wikisource. It was downloaded to a scratch file without being displayed before any English was written, and was not read; the tale is famous and a remembered rendering could not be ruled out in advance. tools/dependence_check.py, run after both this file and the draft were committed at 7ace478: 0 shared 7-grams, 0 twelve-grams, 0 fifteen-grams, longest common run 6 tokens, on 686 lead words against 670 Giles words. Front matter set to none on that measurement. Reported at wiki/findings/results/RS-20260816g-device-function.md §2.

Planting Pears

A countryman was selling pears in the market. They were sweet and fragrant enough, and the price had gone right up. A Taoist in a torn kerchief and a wadded gown stood begging in front of the barrow. The countryman shouted at him to be off, and he did not go; the countryman lost his temper and added abuse. The Taoist said: "There are several hundred on this barrow. This old monk begs one only. It is no great loss to your worship. What is there to be angry about?" The bystanders urged him to set out a poor one and let the man go, but the countryman held out and would not.

A hired man from one of the stalls, seeing that the jabbering was past bearing, brought out money, bought one, and handed it to the Taoist. The Taoist bowed his thanks and said to the crowd: "A man who has left the world does not know how to be close-fisted. I have fine pears. Let me bring them out and serve the company." Someone said: "If you have them, why not eat your own?" He said: "I only needed this pip for seed." With that he took the pear in both hands and ate it in great mouthfuls, and when it was nearly gone he held the pip in his hand, unslung the mattock from his shoulder, dug a hole in the ground a few inches deep, put it in, and covered it over with earth. He asked the market people for hot water to water it with. A busybody got boiling water from a shop on the road, and the Taoist took it and soaked the hole. Ten thousand eyes crowded upon the spot. A crooked shoot came up; it grew; in a moment it was a tree, branch and leaf spreading; in a flash, flowers; in a flash, fruit — huge and fragrant, hanging thick over the whole tree. The Taoist went up to the crown of it and picked and bestowed them on the onlookers, and in a moment they were gone. That done, he took the mattock to the tree; chock, chock — it was a long while before it came down; and with the leaves still on it he laid it on his shoulder and went off at an unhurried walk.

When the Taoist first set to work, the countryman had been among the crowd too, craning his neck and staring, and had clean forgotten his own business. Once the Taoist had gone he looked at last at his barrow, and it was empty of pears. Only then did he understand that what had just been handed round was all his own. Looking closer, one of the barrow's handles was missing, freshly hacked off, and his heart filled with rage. He went quickly after him; and turning the corner of a wall, there was the broken handle thrown down at the foot of it, and he knew then that the pear-trunk that had been felled was this very thing. Of the Taoist there was no sign. The whole market was one laugh.

The Historian of the Strange says: The countryman was muddle-headed; his foolishness you could have scooped up in your hands; that the market laughed at him — there was reason in it. I have often seen men in the villages who are called well-off: a good friend begs a little rice and they go sour in the face and reckon it up — "That is several days' keep." Or they are urged to relieve someone in danger, to give a meal to one friendless soul, and again they reckon angrily — "That is food for ten men, or five." It goes so far that fathers and sons, brothers and brothers, weigh out the last grain against each other. But let gambling and lust turn their heads and they empty the purse without grudging; let knife and saw come to the neck and there is no delay about buying life back. Cases of this kind are past telling. That the countryman was a fool — what is there in that to wonder at?

Revision — the seventeen substitutions

Applied to T-zhongli-R06-v1 in order. Left is the draft, right is this file.

575 Chinese characters → 686 English words (draft 675).

Translator's log

Frozen with this file, before any evaluation of it was designed. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. E1–E11 are inherited from the draft's log and are not repeated; D1–D6 are new at revision.

• D1 The two hard words are both about how, not what. 咄 (a monosyllabic cry of dismissal) and 丁丁 (an axe on wood) name a sound, and English has no word that is both the sound and the act. For 丁丁 the revision kept the draft's chock, chock; for 咄 it gave up the sound and took the dismissal (shouted at him to be off). Two devices of the same kind, resolved opposite ways, because English has a plausible axe-noise and no plausible go-away-noise.
• D2 從容徐步 was the revision's largest change. The draft's at his ease is one English idiom where the Chinese has two disyllabic compounds; the revision spends four words (at an unhurried walk) to keep both the temper and the pace. What is given up: the Chinese puts both before the verb and the English cannot.
• D3 The coda is a different text and is not marked as one. 異史氏曰 opens an argumentative register with quoted imagined speech and a rhetorical question at the end. The English follows it without any typographic or lexical signal that the voice has changed — the same decision the Chinese makes.
• D4 一市粲然 keeps the market as subject. The whole market was one laugh, not everyone laughed. The alternative was live throughout and was refused twice.
• D5 Register of the Taoist's speech. 老衲 / 居士 are both formulae of humility and deference and both are Buddhist in origin in the mouth of a Taoist. Kept unregularised (this old monk, your worship); the flatter I / sir was live and would have removed an oddity the Chinese reader also meets.
• D6 What the coda's parallelism cost. 較盡錙銖 (weigh out to the last 錙 and 銖, two ancient weight units) and 刀鋸臨頸 (knife and saw come to the neck) are four-character set phrases. Both were kept literal and unglossed; haggle over pennies and when their life is at stake were the live idiomatic alternatives and were refused, because the coda's whole force is its concreteness.

Device declaration — registered before the study was designed

Why this is here. The session's study limb asks whether a translator's own account of what a device is doing predicts what a blind reader loses when it is removed. The declaration therefore has to be made by the translator, at translation time, in ignorance of the plain alternatives that will be written against it and of the questions that will be asked. This section is that declaration. It was written and committed before E-20260816g-device-function/design.md existed.

The vocabulary is closed. Each marked stretch is assigned exactly one job:

• MANNER — it tells the reader how something was done, or what it looked or sounded like, beyond the bare fact that it happened.
• STANCE — it conveys an attitude, the narrator's or a character's, toward what is described.
• ORNAMENT — it is answering a figure in the Chinese; it tells the reader the Chinese was doing something at this point.
• NONE — the surrounding text carries the job. This wording is my preference and nothing else; rewriting it plainly costs the reader nothing.

SHAM stretches carry no claim: they are marked in the stimulus and left untouched, to measure what the instrument does when nothing has changed.

The rule the plain alternatives must be written under, fixed here so that it is not chosen after the labels are known: replace the marked stretch with the plainest English rendering of the same events that I can write; change nothing outside the stretch; add and remove no event. Where the device is depictive, the plain rendering necessarily commits to less than the depiction does — note (bpu) — and this is a property of the material, not a defect of the design, because the study measures what changes, not whether two renderings say the same thing.

One thing I do not know and am recording as not known: whether L10–L12 are genuinely inert. They are the three places where, revising, I changed the wording and could not say what the change bought. That is why they are declared NONE rather than left out.