Appendix
Everything the six AI translators produced, in full — the briefs each was given, the personas (where one was built), the reading notes, the pass-by-pass revision logs, the finished translations — and the analyses made of them. Each opens as a reading page; the raw markdown is linked alongside.
The library — what each instance read
Before the per-arm detail below: the complete reading list, the six AI arms side by side. The personas were given no style rules — only reading. This names every text each instance read (named, not reproduced), so the source of each translator's voice is fully transparent.
Arm A — inherited
- Persona
- Notes on Tergit's other books
- Notes on the novel
- Translation of Chapter 25
- Revision log
- Statement of approach
- System prompt
- Step kickoffs
Arm B — self-built
- Persona, before the novel
- Persona, after the novel
- Notes on Tergit's other books
- Notes on the novel
- Translation of Chapter 25
- Revision log
- Statement of approach
- System prompt
- Step kickoffs
Arm C — control
- Notes on the novel
- Translation of Chapter 25
- Revision log
- Statement of approach
- System prompt
- Step kickoffs
Arm C-let — control + permission
C-let mirrors C — no persona, no research — except for an explicit permission paragraph added to its brief, giving it leave (not direction) to anglicize, render dialect plainly, fuse paragraphs, naturalize syntax, find English rhyme for embedded lyric, or domesticate culturally specific references, where the choice serves the English text.
- Notes on the novel
- Translation of Chapter 25
- Revision log
- Statement of approach
- System prompt
- Step kickoffs
Arms D-let & D-aim — self-built (broader corpus); forked at translation
D-let and D-aim share a persona built on B's German corpus plus a set of anglophone reference writers (Edith Wharton, Anthony Powell, Nancy Mitford, Christopher Isherwood). Up through the novel-read they are the same machine; they split only at the translation step. D-let translated under the same permission C-let received; D-aim, under an explicit translation school given at the translation step. Their persona and reading notes are shared.
Shared persona & notes
- Persona, before the novel
- Persona, after the novel
- Notes on Tergit's other books
- Notes on bio & tradition (incl. anglophone)
- Notes on the novel
D-let — translated under permission
D-aim — translated under explicit school
Brief & kickoffs (shared by both forks)
The analyses
- Blind analysis — texts only
- Blind analysis — with the German source
- Informed analysis — four-way
- Informed analysis — paper
- Quantitative layer — 40 loci, agreement, foreignization
The seven-way analyses
The full study, run across all seven renderings — the six AI arms (A, B, C, C-let, D-let, D-aim) with the human translation (H) folded in as a co-equal column. Start with the complete one-page version; the five underlying documents follow, each as a reading page with its raw markdown alongside.
The seven-way study — the complete one-page version, with every chart
- Seven-way analysis
- Seven-way quantitative layer
- How the arms reasoned — authority citations
- Four readings of Tergit — the personas
- Seven-way study — paper
Behind the scenes
The German source and the human translation are shown for comparison on the translations page; as published, in-copyright texts they are not redistributed here. The site as it stood at the original four-way version is preserved at /archive/four-way/.
The chapter, illustrated
Chapter 25 — “Spring” — in one machine's English (arm B), set as a small illustrated edition with period plates in the German wood-engraving tradition. Open the illustrated chapter →