After Babel, The Machine?

Blind comparison — four English translations of one chapter (text only)

All four render the same chapter: a single day in 1887 Berlin told in time-stamped vignettes (10 a.m. through 3 a.m.), each section opening with a near-identical refrain about the spring day. That refrain, plus dozens of parallel sentences, gives fixed anchor points for comparison. Everything below is drawn only from the four texts.

1. Each translation on its own terms

T1 — elevated, period-literary, lightly archaizing

Register is the highest-pitched and most consistently "old-fashioned" of the four. Diction reaches for the formal and the slightly antique: "What sweetness," "keep a noble measure," "in the glory of his long, snow-white hair," indifference "to all resisting and demurring," "Be ashamed that you are ashamed!"

Two habits are unique to T1:

It also tends to add a small intensifier or flourish: "suits me very well," "this absurd idolizing," "do not forget who you are," and uniquely renders the 6 p.m. crowd as a "swarming in the Chausseestraße." It keeps German realia (Privatdozent, Fräulein, Junkers, Tiergartenstraße with ß) but translates institutional names (Fresh Mutton, Grey Cloister). Dialogue is class-marked only lightly and stays grammatical — "Nah, don't go killing anyone," "You daft goat" — never phonetic. It preserves the chapter's discrete short paragraphs and sets each refrain on its own line.

T2 — same literary family as T1/T3, but the trio's most frequent lexical outlier

T2 lives in the same period register as T1 and T3 and shares long verbatim stretches with them, yet on individual word choices it is the one that most often goes its own way within the trio:

It is also the trio member that most often keeps German proper names where T1/T3 translate them: the pub is the "Frischer Hammel" (T1/T3: "Fresh Mutton"), the school the "Graues Kloster" (T1/T3: "Grey Cloister"). Stylistically it leans slightly terser ("Paule, must that be?" vs T1/T3 "does it have to be, then?") and is fond of the fragmentary dash: "So, in a shop with a red lantern in the Berlin east — Erna Schmidt's wine room." It drops a possessive T1/T3 keep ("Young friend," not "My young friend"). Like T1 it keeps the short paragraphing and isolates the refrain.

T3 — the trio's "hub": polished, mildly standardizing, a touch more dialect

T3 reads as the most regularized of the literal three. Its signature is mechanical: every time-refrain inserts "o'clock" ("at ten o'clock in the morning"), and once produces the distinctive "at one o'clock at midday." It uses the uninflected German plural "pfennig" ("Twenty pfennig to sew the skirt"), keeps a few foreign items the others drop or English ("Molle" for a glass of beer — unique to T3; "Unter den Linden" spelled in full; "perambulator"), and favors the parenthetical em-dash ("The middleman — a nasty piece of work — says…").

It marks lower-class speech a shade more than T1/T2 without going phonetic: a double negative and "my man" for the wife — "Don't you say nothing about my man — it's only 'cause we've just the one room" (T1/T2 keep the grammatical "a word against my husband… because"). Crucially, T3 sits between T1 and T2 in its wording: it shares a large body of distinctive readings with T1, and a separate body of grammatical choices with T2 (detailed in §2).

T4 — free, modernizing, domesticating; restructures the prose

T4 is the clear outlier and differs on essentially every axis.

Structure. It collapses the novel's short paragraphs into long running blocks, folding the refrains, dialogue, action, and interior thought together. The whole guard-changing scene, for instance, is run into Papa's preceding speech and the 1 p.m. refrain as one paragraph; the love-letter is one paragraph rather than set apart. Where the others let the refrain stand alone as an incantatory section break, T4 absorbs it into the flow and rewrites it as a full sentence: "What a beautiful spring day, that Saturday in March 1887! How sweet the air was at ten o'clock in the morning!" (T1/T2: "What a spring day… What sweetness, at ten in the morning!").

Register & spelling. Contemporary, often American: "fine by me," "he's on the rise," "the powers that be," the crowd "at fever pitch," "I can tell you a thing or two," and US spellings throughout ("Chaussesstrasse" with no article, "Gray Cloister," "kerosene," "baby carriage," "favorably").

Dialogue. The only version to render working-class speech phonetically and coarsely: "I'm goin'," "d'you haff to?," "Lettit go," "leggo," "Can'tcha see," "yer fancy talk," and the blunt "You'll piss away your week's pay again!" (T1/T2: "He'll go and drink up a week's wages again!"). It also switches such lines into direct second-person address.

Freedom with sense. It paraphrases and occasionally shifts meaning: lunch at Hiller's becomes "breakfast"; "don't go killing anyone" becomes "don't kill yourself"; the Schumann lines are reforged into a rhyming couplet ("Since first I saw you, I believe I've gone blind / as if in a dream, only you in my mind"); "fifers and drummers, a martial sound" becomes "The drums, the pipes, the din of war!" It adds interpretive glosses ("swearing in verba magistri and pledging to the highest authority"; "I should be speaking in the pluperfect").

Names/realia. Inconsistent: it translates "Privatdozent" to "lecturer" and drops "Spreewald," yet keeps "Feuerzauber" (and attributes it to "Wagner's"), "Frauenliebe und Leben," "D'accord," and "Annettchen." It calls the father "Father" (the others: "Papa") and "Paulie" (the others: "Paule").

2. Clustering

The decisive split: {T1, T2, T3} vs. T4

T1, T2, and T3 form one tight family; T4 stands alone. The trio frequently runs word-for-word identical over whole sentences, exactly where T4 diverges:

Anchor T1 / T2 / T3 (identical or near) T4
Historian's prophecy "clinics and libraries will be turned back into barracks" "hospitals and libraries will be turned into garrisons once more"
"A premium on want of character." "They've put a premium on men who lack principles."
"The faculty wishes it, so I have heard." "I hear the department is favorably inclined."
Susanna's shame "Be ashamed that you are ashamed!" "Shame on you for being ashamed!"
"to be allowed to be honestly sensual" "to be honest about my desires"
Amalie's aside "Good, unsuspecting Papa! thought Amalie." "Dear, innocent Father! thought Amalie."

The trio also agrees against T4 on the refrain shape ("What sweetness, at [time]"), on keeping "Privatdozent," "kept woman," "middleman / a nasty piece of work," "mocha," the German street-names with ß, "Papa," the translated Schumann title, and the short-paragraph architecture. Every structural and register feature listed for T4 above is a point of departure from all three of the others at once. This grouping is not close — it is a gulf.

Within the trio: cross-cutting agreements, with T3 in the middle

The three literal versions are mutually entangled rather than cleanly paired off. Each pair shares distinctive readings the third lacks:

T1 ↔︎ T3 — the tightest pair by distinctive, content-bearing agreement. These are the agreements least likely to be coincidence — verbatim whole sentences and consistent rare word-choices:

T2 ↔︎ T3 — a quieter, grammar-and-register layer. Where T1 differs, T2 and T3 often agree on more "standard" English phrasings:

T1 ↔︎ T2 — fewer distinctive agreements, but real ones (and one very loud one).

Net reading of the trio. T3 is the hub: it shares a large, vivid set of readings with T1 and a separate, mostly grammatical set with T2, so it is hard to detach from either. Of the three possible pairings, T1 and T3 read most alike when weighted by distinctive shared phrasing (verbatim sentences, the recurring "coupé," "popular enthusiasm," "Fresh Mutton," "casino gown," "Magic Fire Music"). T2 is the trio's most frequent single outlier at the word level, yet it is firmly inside the family — locked to T1 by the identical refrain and to T3 by a consistent grammatical layer.

A minor cross-cut worth flagging

On a few isolated lexical picks, T1 and T4 independently choose the more naturalized English word while T2 and T3 keep the more literal one: "orphan" (T1, T4) vs. "without parents" (T2, T3); "doe" (T1, T4) vs. "fawn" (T2, T3); "gold coin" (T1, T4) vs. "gold piece" (T2, T3). These are scattered and do not disturb the main grouping — T1 remains structurally and stylistically deep inside the literal trio — but they are a real, if faint, recurring pattern.

Summary

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