Method

Four versions of one chapter — three by machine, one by hand. What was held the same, what varied, and how the four were read.

The design

Four English renderings of one chapter — Chapter 25 of Tergit's Effingers. Three came from the same underlying AI model, given the same source, the same instructions, and the same process; the fourth is the published human translation. Between the three machines, one thing varied — how each formed its translating persona.

• A — inherited. A persona built from a human translator's critical and biographical writing about Tergit.
• B — self-built. A persona the machine wrote for itself, after assembling and reading a wide corpus: Tergit's own books, scholarship about her, and her contemporaries. The human translator's writing was excluded.
• C — control. No persona and no research.

The procedure

A and B worked in four steps; the control joined at the third.

1. Read the author's other books, and take notes.
2. Write the persona.
3. Read the full novel — 151 chapters — and take notes.
4. Translate Chapter 25, revising over up to five passes, each one logged.

The constraints

• No internet. Each arm worked only from what it was given.
• A full read, not a skim. An early trial run showed a machine will economise — sample rather than read — even when the whole text fits in front of it; the real run used fresh instances and an explicit instruction to read in full.
• A wall around the self-built arm. It never saw the human translator's writing — checked across its corpus, its notes, its persona, and its translation. Its sense of the author is independent.
• The same limit for all three. Up to five revision passes, no more.
• No guidance on style. None of the arms was told how to translate — no instruction on period, register, or usage. The reading was each one's own.

Reading the results

The four finished translations were then read two ways — once blind, with the texts unlabelled and their origins unknown, and once with the full design known — a guard against reading in what one expects to find. The blind reading was run twice: on the texts alone, and with the German source beside them.