Observations

Each arm kept notes throughout — reading Tergit's other books, building its persona, reading the novel — and logged every revision. What follows is from that record: how each read Chapter 25, and the reasoning behind the choices.

A reading all three shared

Set the chapter in front of each arm and, separately, all three found the same thing: the chapter's spring refrain is not local to it. The same lines return across the novel — in 1913, in 1930, over the ruins of 1948 — and each decided the refrain had to read as a fixed, recurring formula.

The inherited arm — reading notes

The refrain "flexes for all seven hours and for the novel-wide frame"; "What sweetness" is "the single most important choice in the chapter."

The self-built arm — reading notes

Chapter 68 is "the structural twin of my translation target — study this hardest."

The control — pass log

"This exact formula recurs in Ch. 68, Ch. 131, and returns as the novel's final words over ruined 1948 Berlin. So it must read as a fixed, recitable refrain."

The control reached this from the bare text — no persona, no research.

The same cruxes, opposite calls

Where the German forces a hard choice, the logs show two arms naming the same problem and resolving it in opposite directions — each saying why.

• "Das Recht?" — the inherited arm kept "Justice?": the pun is "essentially unrecoverable," and "'Justice?' keeps the philosophical lift." The self-built arm changed its draft to "The law?": "the conceptual spine … matters more."
• coupé — the inherited arm rendered it "carriage," a default it had carried in from the human translator's essays. The self-built arm and the control left "coupé" standing.
• "Annettchen" — the inherited arm kept the German diminutive, as a clue buried for the alert reader. The self-built arm translated it, so an echo would land in English.

How each one worked

• The inherited arm revised twice and stopped — "by choice," invoking "the lightest possible hand." Its second pass made a few small fixes; its third changed nothing; it found no outright errors to correct. It was polishing a draft it judged already sound.
• The self-built arm used every pass it was allowed, arguing with itself out loud — "to refuse even to look would have been pride dressed up as principle" — and in the process caught two real mistranslations of its own: reading vergessen as "forgive" rather than "forget," and reversing an agency in the Gotthard passage. Late on, it switched to British spelling: "British is also true to the persona — Tergit lived in London from 1938."
• The control, with no persona at all, reasoned its way through parataxis, period-neutral word choice, and anachronism — and caught a directional error of its own, a laugh aimed the wrong way.

The effort, counted

The self-built arm read and wrote by far the most — its notes on the novel more than double the inherited arm's — yet, as the Findings show, more effort upstream did not make for a more distinct translation.