Inherited, Self-Built, or None: Does a Translator-Persona's Provenance Shape a Literary Translation?

A four-way case study of one chapter of Gabriele Tergit's Effingers — three AI renderings that differ only in how their translating persona was formed, read alongside the established human translation.

Stance and provenance. This paper is written by the informed (non-blind) analyst arm of the study. It is built from a prior close reading (analysis.md) and the working notes in notes/, and every claim is grounded in quoted evidence from the source chapter, the four translations, and — for the three AI arms — their personas and pass logs. Throughout, the four renderings are treated as co-equal columns. The work is description, clustering, and evidence-grounded analysis, not a ranking. I characterize closeness to the German and patterns of divergence, but which rendering is the better or more aesthetically successful literary translation is a judgment reserved for human reviewers and is deliberately not made here. A separate blind comparison of the same four texts was run independently and withheld from me, for later triangulation.

Abstract

We ask whether the source of an AI translator-persona's "soul" shapes the resulting literary translation, and how AI renderings stand in relation to an established human translation. Four English versions of one German chapter — Chapter 25 ("Frühling") of Gabriele Tergit's novel Effingers — are compared as co-equal columns. Three are AI renderings that differ only in how the translating persona was formed: A built its persona from an existing body of interpretive and translation-craft writing about the author, by the established human translator of her work (an inherited frame); B self-authored its persona from a 46-document corpus it assembled (the author's works, scholarship, contemporaries), excluding the human translator's writing (a self-made frame), and revised that persona after reading the full novel; C is the control (no persona, no research). The fourth, H, is the human translator's own published version. Reading all four against the German and coding 27 discrete divergence loci, we find that the three AI arms cluster tightly (mean pairwise agreement ≈ 73% of loci) while H stands apart (mean agreement with the AI arms ≈ 21%). Within the AI cluster, B and C are the closest pair (81%) and A is the most distinct. The expectation that A — whose persona was built from H's own writing — would resemble H more than B or C do is, on the whole, not borne out: A is marginally the closest AI arm to H (8 of 27 loci vs 4–5), but the margin rests on only two loci where A sides with H against both other AI arms, and both are discrete lexical rules A imported verbatim from the human translator's essays; on the dominant structural and stylistic features A clusters with B and C. Because the persona-free control reaches the same cluster, we attribute the convergence chiefly to the shared base model and the shared full-read protocol, not to the personas, which differ greatly in conception yet leave a modest footprint on the output. We report process/effort, documented reasoning, and the persona contrasts. The study is an n = 1 qualitative case study with an informed analyst and a base model shared across the AI arms; findings are descriptive, not inferential.

1. Background and research question

Literary translation is often described as the production of a voice — not chiefly what is said but how it is said. If a translating agent's voice is shaped by a constructed authorial "persona," a natural question is whether the provenance of that persona — where the agent's understanding of the author comes from — leaves a detectable mark on the finished translation, and how any such mark compares to the choices a human translator actually made.

The present case study isolates persona provenance while holding the source text, the procedure, and the base model fixed across three AI arms, and adds the established human translation as a fourth, co-equal column. The research question, as posed by the study's coordinator, is twofold:

1. Does the source of a translator-persona's soul shape the resulting literary translation?
2. How do the AI renderings stand in relation to the established human translation — and in particular, does the arm whose persona was built from the human translator's own writing about the author resemble that translator's published version more than the other arms do?

The text under translation is Chapter 25 of Effingers, titled "Frühling" ("Spring"). It is a montage chapter: one Saturday — 16 March 1887 — narrated hour by hour, cross-cutting the whole society (the wealthy Eugenie and her seamstress; the infatuated girl Sofie; the Jewish jurist Waldemar and the singer Susanna; the working-class Chausseestraße; the jilted Theodor and the child-prostitute Wanda), stitched together by a recurring time-stamped spring-refrain. Its translation-bearing features — the refrain and its deliberate variants; the montage paragraphing; Berlin working-class dialect; quoted song and opera titles; forms of address and proper nouns; a high legal-political register in the Waldemar scene; and Tergit's terse, verbless, paratactic sentence-rhythm — give many discrete sites at which translators must choose, and so make the chapter a useful probe.

2. Methods

2.1 Design and the four renderings

A single German chapter was rendered into English four times. Three renderings (A, B, C) were produced by AI translators under controlled conditions differing only in persona provenance; the fourth (H) is the human anchor.

• A — inherited frame. A constructed a first-person authorial persona ("the self I translate from") from an existing body of critical, biographical, and translation-craft writing about the author, by the established human translator of her work. A's own step-2 notes name the source: the translator is Sophie Duvernoy (Käsebier, NYRB 2019; Effingers, NYRB), and A built the persona from four Duvernoy documents, including Duvernoy's introduction to Effingers and a blog essay that works through a sample translation of the same novel (A_step2 L12–17). Thus H is not merely "a human anchor": H is the very translator whose writing became A's persona — which makes the A-vs-H comparison (§3.5) the study's sharpest test.
• B — self-made frame. B assembled and read a broad corpus itself — the author's primary works, biographies and scholarship, and her contemporaries and literary tradition — and self-authored its persona from that corpus. By design the corpus excluded any writing by the human translator whose frame defines A (control verified: zero mentions of Duvernoy across B's files). B additionally revised its persona after reading the full novel; both versions (before/after) are available.
• C — control. No persona, no research beyond reading the novel: C read and translated.
• H — human anchor. The established human translator's own published English version of the chapter. Only the finished text exists — no persona, construction notes, or pass log — so H's approach is inferred from the text alone, and labelled as inference wherever it is drawn.

2.2 Procedure, controls, and constraints

The three AI arms followed a four-step procedure (A and B did steps 1–4; C joined at step 3): (1) read the author's primary corpus (5 works), notes only; (2) constitute the persona, notes only; (3) read the full novel (Effingers, 151 chapters plus an epilogue), notes only; (4) translate Chapter 25 over up to five logged revision passes, each agent deciding how many to take. Controls: all three AI arms had no internet access and minimal system prompts (no style, epoch, or usage guidance — the interpretation was the agent's own); a full-read protocol was enforced at steps 1 and 3 (read in full, no sampling), using fresh instances after a pilot in which an instance economized by sampling; a uniform five-pass cap at step 4; and verification that arm B never saw the human translator's writing. H is a published human translation and did not undergo this procedure. The three AI arms share a common base model — a point that bears directly on the interpretation of their convergence (§4).

2.3 Quantitative measurements

Supplied by the coordinator (facts and measurements only):

2.4 Analytic stance and coding

I read the German source in full (extracted from the supplied .docx), then all four translations in full, then — for the AI arms — every persona, construction note, reading note, and pass log. I assembled the chapter's salient features and, for each, placed the German beside all four English renderings, recording that, where, and the nature of each difference. To convert this qualitative reading into a transparent, reproducible clustering measure, I coded 27 discrete divergence loci (Appendix A), each by the salient strategic choice it presents, and partitioned the four renderings into agreement groups at each locus. A pair of renderings "agrees" at a locus if both fall in the same group; pairwise agreement is the count of loci (out of 27) at which a pair agrees. This is an explicitly descriptive instrument — one defensible coding among several, presented for transparency — and not an inferential test; with n = 1 chapter no statistical claim is made. For H, which has no process record, every statement about reasoning is an inference from the finished text and is marked as such.

A note on the word fidelity. Where I describe a rendering as tracking the German construction or lexis closely (or, conversely, recasting freely), this is a descriptive observation about source-closeness, not a quality verdict. Closeness to the source is not equivalent to literary merit; a freer rendering may be the superior literary translation. That judgment is reserved for human reviewers.

3. Results

3.1 Process and effort

All three AI arms logged their passes; H has none. The logged pass counts reconcile with the measurements as one draft plus revisions: A logged three entries (a draft plus two revision passes, the second making no changes → "2 revisions"); B logged five (a draft plus four revisions, reaching the five-pass cap); C logged four (a draft plus three revisions, holding the fifth pass in reserve).

The procedure functioned differently across arms. For B and C the multi-pass process caught real mistranslations: B's pass 2 corrected two outright errors in its own draft — vergessen rendered "forgive" → "forget," and the Gotthard-Tunnel idiom whose agency it had reversed ("hat mich auf dem Gewissen", "has me on its conscience") — and C's pass 4 caught a directional idiom, entgegenlachen "laughing back at us" → "laughs to greet us," and earlier self-corrected a Wagner calque ("Fire Magic" → "Magic Fire Music"). A's revisions found no outright meaning-errors; its pass 2 made five small de-translationese fixes and its pass 3 changed nothing. Stopping behaviour also differed: A stopped early "by choice," invoking "the lightest possible hand"; B went to the cap, audibly weighing whether to stop ("to refuse even to look would have been pride dressed up as principle"); C held one pass in reserve. Effort upstream varied widely too (Table, §2.3): B's step-3 novel notes (~48,800 w) were more than double A's (~21,400 w) and over triple C's (~13,600 w), yet — as §3.2 shows — upstream effort did not translate into proportionate divergence of output.

3.2 Where the four diverge and converge — the clustering

Headline. On nearly every pervasive, load-bearing feature, A, B, and C cluster together and H stands apart. The coded tally (Appendix A) makes the shape explicit: pairwise agreement among the AI arms is AB = 18, AC = 19, BC = 22 (of 27 loci; mean ≈ 73%), while agreement between each AI arm and H is AH = 8, BH = 4, CH = 5 (mean ≈ 21%). Within the AI cluster, B and C are the tightest pair (22/27, frequently word-for-word identical), and A is the most distinct of the three, chiefly because it retains more German and makes a handful of its own lexical calls. A small number of cross-cutting splits divide the field otherwise (§3.2.8). The feature-by-feature evidence follows.

3.2.1 The spring-refrain

German (10 a.m.): "Was für ein Frühlingstag, dieser Sonnabend im März des Jahres 1887! Was für eine Süße, morgens um zehn Uhr!"

• A: "What a spring day, this Saturday in March of the year 1887! What sweetness, at ten in the morning!"
• B: "What a spring day, this Saturday in March of the year 1887! What sweetness, at ten in the morning!" (verbatim A)
• C: "What a spring day, this Saturday in March of the year 1887! What sweetness, at ten o'clock in the morning!"
• H: "What a beautiful spring day, that Saturday in March 1887! How sweet the air was at ten o'clock in the morning!"

The AI arms converge almost exactly — literal Süße → "What sweetness," the demonstrative, and "of the year 1887" (A and B verbatim; C adds only "o'clock"). H diverges on three counts at once: it adds "beautiful," renders the noun-exclamation as the clause "How sweet the air was" (supplying "the air" and a finite past-tense verb), and drops "of the year." All four nonetheless preserve Tergit's variants of the refrain (the 6 p.m. instance dropping "of the year" and swapping in a second exclamation; the 8 p.m. single clause; the 3 a.m. return to the full form), so the tracking of variants is four-way convergent even as the wording splits A/B/C vs H.

3.2.2 The montage — paragraphing of the refrain

This is H's single largest structural departure, and it is verifiable in the raw text. In the source and in all three AI versions each refrain stands alone, set off by blank lines — the white-space beat that makes the chapter read as a clock-montage. H instead runs every refrain into the adjacent paragraph, joining the end of one scene, the refrain, and the start of the next into one block:

H (L73): "…will you take the girl out for a walk through the Tiergarten later?" What a beautiful spring day… How sweet the air was at one o'clock in the afternoon! It was time for the changing of the guard. Standing at the window of his university office, Waldemar Goldschmidt, lecturer, gazed out…"

A (L83–85): … ⏎⏎ "What a spring day, this Saturday in March of the year 1887! What sweetness, at one in the afternoon!" ⏎⏎ "The guard was changing! At a window of the university stood the Privatdozent Waldemar Goldschmidt…"

The fusion is consistent across all the chapter's refrains, so it reads as an intentional feature of H's continuous-prose style rather than a stray artifact — and it dissolves precisely the montage spacing the AI arms keep.

3.2.3 Berlin dialect

German (Chausseestraße): "»Paule, muß denn det sin?« … »Wird er doch wieder'n Wochenlohn versaufen!«"

• A: "Paule, must that be?" … "He'll go and drink up a week's wages again!"
• B: "Paule, does it have to be, then?" … "He'll go and drink up a week's wages again!"
• C: "Paule, does it have to be, then?" … "He'll go and drink away a week's wages again!"
• H: "Oh Paulie, d'you haff to?" … "You'll piss away your week's pay again!"

A clear spectrum. H carries class through heavy eye-dialect (phonetic respelling — "Paulie," "d'you haff to," elsewhere "leggo," "yer," "Can'tcha") and a blunt colloquial-American lexis ("piss away," "Stupid cow," "What a sop!"). A and B carry class through diction and idiom, with very light eye-dialect and a British flavour ("leave off," "daft goose/goat," "carry on so"); C sits a touch rougher (double negatives, "Aw"/"Naw," "'cause") but still avoids phonetic respelling. Notably, all three AI arms articulated the same governing principle independently — render Berlinisch as generic working-class English, not Cockney (A: "NOT Cockney/Brooklyn"; B: "I will not turn Berlinisch into Cockney … that is the translator's vanity"; C: "did NOT map onto a specific English dialect … to avoid importing a foreign locale"). The closing "Der Dämel!" is a four-way divergence with no two alike: A "The chump!", B "The great fool!", C "The ninny!", H "What a sop!"

3.2.4 Quoted song and opera titles

Opposite surface strategies: the AI arms translate the German titles into English; H keeps them in German and, where the AI arms strip apparatus, adds the attribution "Wagner's" not present in the source. The Schumann lyric is rendered plainly by all three AI arms (A: "Since I beheld you, I think myself blind; ever, as in a dream, I see you alone"); H alone makes a rhyme ("…I believe I've gone blind, as if in a dream, only you in my mind"). And B alone capitalizes "You/Your" through Sofie's letter to mirror the German reverent Du, a choice B documents ("to carry the intimacy of the German Du-letter").

3.2.5 Forms of address and proper nouns (the foreignization gradient)

• die Widerklee: A/B/C keep the German calque "The Widerklee"; H drops it.
• Privatdozent: A/B/C keep the German title; H translates → "lecturer."
• Street names: A/B/C keep German + ß (Chausseestraße…); H anglicizes to "-strasse." Weidendammer Brücke: A keeps the German; B/C/H → "Weidendamm Bridge."
• Graues Kloster: A keeps the German; B/C "Grey Cloister"; H "Gray Cloister."
• Einverstanden?: A/B/C "Agreed?"; H "D'accord?" (a French substitution).

The net foreignization gradient on proper nouns runs A > C ≈ B ≫ H — A retains the most German, H the least. On these features A is the furthest of the four from H, complicating any simple A≈H expectation.

3.2.6 The high register (Waldemar / the historian)

German: "Prämie auf Charakterlosigkeit." / "Ochsen, im wahren Sinne…" / "Schäm dich, daß du dich schämst!"

• A/B/C (near-identical): "A premium on want of character." / "Oxen, in the true sense[ of the word]…" / "Be ashamed that you are ashamed!"
• H: "They've put a premium on men who lack principles." / "What numbskulls. That's why these fools worship young girls." / "Shame on you for being ashamed!"

The AI arms render the aphorisms compactly and close to the German; H expands and idiomatizes (abstract Charakterlosigkeit → concrete "men who lack principles"; "Oxen" → "What numbskulls"). The same shows in syntax: where the German inverts ("…lagert die Wolle"), A/B/C keep the inversion ("the wool lies stored"); H regularizes to plain SVO ("The wool was stored in the old palace built by the Margrave of Brandenburg").

3.2.7 The cluster map

• B ≈ C are the tightest pair (22/27) — frequently verbatim ("casino gown," "a martial sound," "Magic Fire Music," "The lotus flower fears," "mutton-legs," "the Fresh Mutton," "coupé," "daft goat," "Grey Cloister"). With a shared base model and the persona-free control in this pair, this is the base-model default in plainest form.
• A joins the strategy (foreignizing, literal, montage-holding, "What sweetness," "Agreed," "The Widerklee," English song-titles, the compact aphorisms) but stands apart in execution: it keeps the most German proper nouns and makes its own calls — "dinner gown" (vs B/C "casino gown"), "Magic Fire" (vs "…Music"), "warlike sound" (vs "martial"), "carriage"/"stool" (domesticating where B/C keep "coupé"/"tabouret").
• H is the outlier on the dominant axis: domesticating, montage-fusing, eye-dialect, "How sweet the air was," German song-titles retained but the lyric rhymed, "lecturer," anglicized streets, French "D'accord," American idiom.

3.2.8 Cross-cutting splits

A few loci divide the field otherwise, and they matter for §3.5:

• A + H vs B + C on "Das Recht?" → A and H "Justice?"; B and C "The law?" (the one prominent place A sides with H against both other AI arms; documented as a deliberate, opposite call — §3.3). (On the next phrase the field regroups: A, C, and H all write "Roman law," B alone "the law of the Romans.")
• A + H vs B + C on coupé → A and H "carriage"; B and C "coupé."
• A + C + H keep "Annettchen"; B alone translates → "dear little Annette."
• A + C + H use American spellings ("honor," "theater"); B is consistently British ("honour," "theatre"). H is uniformly American throughout (also "gray," "kerosene," "pants," "percent"); A and C are mixed (American spelling, British idiom) — so orthography does not cleanly separate the AI arms from H.
• Singletons: C alone keeps "Molle" (the Berlin word for a beer) and alone renders "Schloss" → "Palace"; A alone keeps "Graues Kloster"/"Frischer Hammel." Two four-way splits where everyone differs: Petroleum → "lamp oil"/"paraffin"/"petroleum"/"kerosene" (A/B/C/H); Der Dämel → "chump"/"great fool"/"ninny"/"sop."

3.3 The AI arms' documented choices and reasoning

A shared, whole-novel-grounded decision underlies the refrain. All three AI arms independently discovered, through the full read, that the refrain is not local to Chapter 25 but recurs across the novel — Ch 68 ("Frühling," 1913), Ch 131 ("Frühling 1930"), and the close in 1948 — and all three therefore fixed it as a recitable formula built to recur verbatim: A's pass log ("flexes … for the novel-wide frame (Ch 68 1913, Ch 131 1930, Epilog 1948)"); B's reading notes ("Ch 68 … THE STRUCTURAL TWIN OF MY TRANSLATION TARGET … STUDY THIS HARDEST"); C's pass log ("this exact formula recurs in Ch68 (1913), Ch131 (1930), and returns as the novel's final words over ruined 1948 Berlin"). That the control reached this purely from the full read is the strongest single sign that the convergence is a product of the shared protocol, not the personas.

The richest material for the cross-cutting splits lies in the logs, because two arms identified the same crux and resolved it oppositely, each explaining why:

• "Das Recht?" A kept "Justice?," reasoning that the der Rechte / das Recht pun is "essentially unrecoverable" and "'Justice?' keeps the philosophical lift." B changed its draft "Right?" to "The law?": "I accept that the pun … goes soft in English; the conceptual spine — a jurist who … thinks at once of law itself — matters more, and 'law' carries it." Same diagnosis, opposite resolution; the field splits A+H vs B+C. (Inference for H, which has no log: from "Justice? … Roman law … can the new civil code forego it?" one reads the same "philosophical lift" instinct A articulates.)
• "Annettchen." A kept the German diminutive as a buried cross-novel clue (its notes: the "Annettchen Easter-egg … left buried for the alert reader," linking the seamstress's lost lover to a character elsewhere in the novel). C kept it for a within-chapter reason ("so the dramatic-irony clue survives … Eugenie cannot [connect it]" plus "Eugenie's clean echo"). B translated it to "dear little Annette," prioritizing the echo (making both occurrences identical "so the English reader hears the same words repeated back, as the German does"). Three documented rationales; B's lands on a different surface.
• "Kasinotoilette." B and C both wrote "casino gown" — for different reasons (B: "Kasino" = officers'-mess; C: the "resort casino … at Nice"). A wrote "dinner gown," its log flagging this as a known flattening it considered reversing and did not.
• coupé → "carriage." A's log lists this under "domestication of society-words (persona defaults)"; it is lifted almost verbatim from Duvernoy's essay ("no reason to retain 'coupé' when 'carriage' does"). B and C kept "coupé." A second documented place A's inherited frame steers it toward H.

The arms' deliberative temperament also differs, as recorded in §3.1: A polished a draft it judged sound and stopped early; B and C used the multi-pass process partly to catch genuine mistranslations; C additionally reasoned on the page about parataxis (restoring Käte's coordinate clauses), period-neutral diction (Mayer's "down to the fact" → "chiefly because"), and anachronism ("clueless" → "unsuspecting"), all without a persona.

3.4 The personas: A vs B, and B before vs after the novel

Two conceptions of one author. Both A and B wrote their personas in the first person, as Tergit, and — because both read widely about her — they converge on the biography (Elise Hirschmann, born 1894 in the Raupachstraße; the two Berlins, poor-east and wealthy-Tiergarten, that formed "the whole of my eye"; the shy court-reporter's "recording-tape" method; the name Gitter reversed to Tergit; anti-Zionism held in tension; the "driven-out"; the deaths of son Peter and husband Heinz; and the governing discipline that the novel is "not written from the end" — no doom, no hindsight). On who Tergit is, the inherited and self-built souls largely agree.

They differ in kind. A's persona, drawn from a translator's essays, is dense with explicit English-craft method: the Wharton/Powell/Mitford "ear," a "blended, mid-Atlantic, midcentury" register, "foreign society-words naturalized — a coupé becomes a carriage," "honorifics simplified … the Prussian Rat titles all to 'Councilor,'" "Berlinisch with a light hand … not Cockney," bare "said" tags, "the lightest possible hand." It conceives Tergit through the eye of someone who has already carried her into English. B's persona, drawn from the author's own works, biographies, scholarship, and contemporaries — and, by design, no translator's writing — is dense instead with moral and historical sensibility: "My greatest hatred is the generalization"; "I am a historian by training — Meinecke was my teacher … Warum, wieso, weshalb Hitler?"; "I am one of the Vertriebenen, the driven-out"; "Diagnosis, not prophecy." On English tactics it is almost silent, closing: "Quiet. Exact. Fast. Warm under the cool … Now let me go and see the chapter." This is the cleanest expression of the design's contrast: A inherited a translator's blueprint; B inherited (built) an author's interior and had to improvise the surface tactics at translation time. (B independently reached for one of the same anglophone touchstones Duvernoy uses — likening a Tergit narrator to "a Mitford ingénue" — a convergence of literary instinct, not contamination.)

B before vs after the novel. B's two persona versions are identical but for a single added paragraph (the "+~980 chars" of the measurements). The addition is a "second law": that the true hero of the book is not a person but Time —

"der unbarmherzige Motor, der eigentliche Held, ist die Zeit. Since 1914 we have not lived our lives; we have been lived … Paul believes he is doing the shoving, and he is being shoved … the current takes them, and I hold the reader's eye on the swimmer, never on the flood … the chronicle must move — scene cut hard against scene, the dated years tolling like a bell."

Its origin is documented: in the full read B encountered Tergit's own statement ("Der unbarmherzige Motor und eigentliche Held des Romans ist die ZEIT … wir alle [sind] … seit 1914 gelebt worden") and integrated it. This is a genuine interpretive deepening, and it sits in tension with B's own before-novel individualism ("the single human soul," "individuals first"), which B reconciles ("I neither punish my people with their fates nor let them master them"). It also runs opposite to A's inherited frame, in which Duvernoy stresses that Tergit rejected the title Der Ewige Strom ("The Eternal Stream") precisely so the people would not seem "ineluctably swept up by … history" — "individual choices matter." So on the agency↔︎determinism axis, A's inherited soul foregrounds agency; B's self-built soul, after the full read, adds the Time-fatalism as co-equal — a real frame-level divergence, both readings textually grounded.

Does the revision surface in the translation? Largely no — and that is explicable. B's pass-1 governing idea is the before-law ("it is not written from the end … the dread is left entirely to the reader"). Chapter 25 is set in 1887 — the "founding-era idyll," before the post-1914 machinery of Time grinds — and B's log treats it as the living present where "nobody … knows what 1887 leads to." The "Time as hero" theme is therefore deliberately latent in this chapter; its only faint trace is the "tolling bell" framing of the refrain (pass 3: "the tolling cycle it should"). The before/after change is thus significant as interpretation but leaves little distinguishable signature in B's Chapter 25 text relative to A's or C's — because this is precisely the chapter where the macro-fatalism is held back.

The gap between A's persona and A's output. A's persona is the most concrete blueprint of the four, and A followed it only selectively, by its own design. The persona reserves an override: "I am the author, not a faithful servant of the author … I keep the last call. Where my own ear wants to hold a German cadence that a translator would smooth … I may." A exercised that license toward foreignization. It followed the discrete Duvernoy rules it had verbatim — coupé→"carriage," Rat→"the Councilor" (even Duvernoy's American one-l spelling), "Justice?", bare tags, light no-Cockney dialect — but on the broad strategy it diverged from the inherited domesticating frame: it kept German proper nouns (justified under a separate persona instinct, "Berlin kept present"), translated the song-titles, held the montage seams, and rendered "What sweetness." Most tellingly, A enacted a montage-preserving principle its persona attributes to H's method ("Hold the seams; the assemblage is the form") that H's own published text does not visibly honour (§3.2.2). The inheritance transmitted Tergit's interpretation (genre, tone, the no-doom thesis, the whole-novel architecture) far more than it reproduced H's surface choices.

3.5 Where the human (H) sits — including the A≈H question

Treated as its own result: H stands apart from all three AI arms on the dominant axis, and it does so on the features that most define a literary surface — how the refrain sounds and sits on the page, how dialect is voiced, whether the foreign is kept or naturalized, how quotations are handled, and how sentences are shaped (§3.2). The coded agreement of each AI arm with H is low and roughly even: AH = 8, BH = 4, CH = 5 of 27 loci, against AI–AI agreements of 18–22. Read off the page (H has no notes), H's profile is a translator working for continuous, idiomatic, domesticated English: fusing the montage into running prose; anglicizing place-names; supplying an added attribution ("Wagner's"); translating titles to plain English ("lecturer"); reinterpreting detail ("riding hats" for Schleier um den Zylinder); reaching for the freer idiom ("What numbskulls," "famished," French "D'accord") and the rhymed lyric; and writing dialect in confident eye-dialect. The three AI arms, by contrast, share a more literal, foreignizing, source-tracking default.

Does A — whose persona was built from H's own writing — resemble H more than B or C do? A calibrated answer: marginally, and not on the whole. A is nominally the closest AI arm to H (AH = 8 vs BH = 4, CH = 5), but the margin is small and far below any AI–AI pair, and it rests on a handful of discrete loci. Of A's eight agreements with H, only two are cases where A sides with H against both other AI arms — "Justice?" and coupé→"carriage" — and both are rules A imported almost verbatim from Duvernoy's published essays (its persona source). The other six (keeping "Schloss," keeping "Annettchen," lowercase Du, translating "Molle," the Hammelbeine-as-equivalent strategy, American spelling) are each shared with at least one other AI arm, so they are not A-specific resemblances to H. Against this short list stands the overwhelming weight of §3.2: on the refrain's wording and layout, "What sweetness," the translated song-titles, "The Widerklee," the German street-names, "Privatdozent," "Agreed," the compact aphorisms, the British-flavoured idiom, and the held montage, A clusters with B and C against H — and on proper nouns A is the most foreignizing of all four, i.e. in that dimension further from domesticating-H than B or C are.

The most economical account of why is supplied by the control. C — no persona, no research — lands squarely in the AI cluster (CH = 5; AC = 19, BC = 22), reaching the cross-novel refrain decision, the no-Cockney principle, the "Annettchen"-as-clue choice, register-differentiation, and leitword consistency purely from the full read and base-model competence. If the persona-free arm already produces the cluster, the cluster is chiefly a product of the shared base model and the shared full-read protocol, not of the personas.

4. Discussion

Three findings stand out.

(1) Persona provenance shaped conception far more than output. The two constructed personas differ profoundly in kind — A a translator's craft-blueprint, B an author's moral-historical interior — and B's post-novel revision adds a genuinely new interpretive thesis (Time as the book's hero). Yet the three AI translations converge tightly (mean AI–AI agreement ≈ 73% of coded loci), and the persona-free control sits inside that convergence. The personas' detectable footprint on this chapter's output is therefore modest: a handful of specific lexical calls (A's coupé→carriage and "dinner gown"; B's "dear little Annette," British spelling, and capitalized Du; C's lone "Molle") and, more richly, a differentiated vocabulary of documented reasoning. The strongest determinant of the shared surface appears to be the two things held constant across the AI arms — the base model and the full-read protocol — the latter visibly responsible for the convergent, whole-novel-grounded refrain decision that even the control reached.

(2) The human translation is the genuine outlier. What separates one of these four columns from the other three is not which soul stood behind it but that H was produced by a human translator whose instinct, on this chapter, was to domesticate — to naturalize the foreign, regularize the syntax, voice dialect in eye-dialect, gloss and reinterpret, and dissolve the montage into continuous prose — where the AI arms, severally and together, stayed close to the German. We frame this descriptively: the AI arms track the source's wording, structure, and foreign texture more closely; H recasts more freely into fluent target-language prose. We do not read this as a quality difference. Source-closeness is not literary merit, and a freer, more domesticated rendering may well be the more accomplished literary translation; that judgment is reserved for human reviewers.

(3) The headline expectation is not borne out — with a calibrated caveat. The design invites the hypothesis that A, built from H's own writing, should resemble H. The texts show that the inheritance transmitted H's understanding of the author (which A in fact shares with B, and in thinner form even with the persona-free C) rather than H's translating hand. A's persona explicitly built in a license to override its inherited frame ("I keep the last call"), and A exercised it toward a literal, foreignizing, montage-preserving result — at times enacting principles it attributed to H's method but that H's own text does not display. The one honest qualification is quantitative: A is the closest AI arm to H, but by a thin margin (8 vs 4–5 of 27 loci) traceable to two persona-imported lexical rules, not to a pervasive stylistic kinship.

Taken together, the case suggests that — for this chapter, this model, and this protocol — what a persona changes is how the translator talks about the work and a scatter of local choices, more than the global character of the prose, and that a deeply read but persona-free control can match persona-bearing arms on most structural and stylistic decisions.

5. Limitations

• n = 1 chapter, one instance per AI arm. Every pattern here is a case-study observation, not a measured effect; nothing supports generalization to other chapters, authors, models, or runs.
• Shared base model. The three AI arms share one base model, which is a live confound for every similarity among them; the convergence we attribute to "model + protocol" cannot be separated into its parts within this design.
• Informed (non-blind) analyst. I knew the arm identities, including the A↔︎H link — a standing source of expectation bias. I mitigated it by pre-registering the A≈H comparison as a hypothesis, coding divergence transparently (Appendix A), and reporting the negative/calibrated result the evidence supports; but the mitigation is procedural, not a substitute for blinding. An independent blind comparison of the same four texts exists and was withheld from me, for later triangulation.
• The coding is one defensible instrument. Locus selection, granularity, and the "salient-choice" calls affect the exact agreement counts; the qualitative pattern (AI–AI ≫ AI–H; B≈C tightest; AH the weak maximum among AI–H) is robust to reasonable recodings, but the integers are not to be over-read.
• H has no process record. All statements about H's reasoning are inferences from the finished text and are labelled as such; only A, B, and C left logs. The montage-fusion in H is read from the supplied file; its consistency across refrains is why it is read as intentional, but it is a property of the text as given.
• Description, not evaluation. Observations about source-closeness, caught mistranslations, or stopping behaviour are about process and pattern, not verdicts of quality. No ranking is offered or implied.

6. Conclusion

Across one chapter of Effingers, three AI translations differing only in persona provenance cluster closely with one another while the established human translation stands apart — the human domesticating where the AI arms stay close to the German. Persona provenance strongly shaped each AI arm's conception of the author and its documented reasoning, but left only a modest footprint on the finished prose; a persona-free control reached most of the same structural and stylistic decisions, pointing to the shared base model and full-read protocol as the principal sources of convergence. The expectation that the arm built from the human translator's own writing would most resemble that translator's published version was not borne out except in two discrete, persona-imported lexical choices. Whether any of these four renderings is the better or more aesthetically successful literary translation is a question this study does not address and does not attempt to answer; it is left, as it should be, to human reviewers.

Appendix A — Coded divergence (27 loci) and pairwise agreement

Each locus is coded by its salient strategic choice; groups list the renderings sharing that choice. A pair agrees at a locus if both fall in the same group. Descriptive only (n = 1 chapter; not inferential).

Pairwise agreement (loci out of 27):

Read-off. AI–AI pairs (AB 18, AC 19, BC 22) → mean ≈ 19.7/27 (~73%); AI–H pairs (AH 8, BH 4, CH 5) → mean ≈ 5.7/27 (~21%). BC = 22 is the maximum (B and C are the tightest pair). AH = 8 is the maximum among AI–H pairs (A is marginally the closest AI arm to H), but of those 8 loci only 2 (#12 coupé, #17 "Justice?") are A-with-H against both other AI arms, and both are rules A imported from the human translator's essays; the other six are shared with ≥1 other AI arm. (Checksum: the six pair counts sum to 76, the total agreeing-pair-instances across all loci.)