Shifting voices: A comparison of two novelists’ translations of a third
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper compares the English and French translations of Mohamed Choukri’s autobiographical work originally written in Arabic under the titleAl khubs al hafi. The translations are somewhat unusual in that both were published long before the source text became available, and in that they were done by two renowned novelists (Paul Bowles and Tahar Ben Jelloun) while Choukri himself was a completely unknown writer. The comparison reveals many contrasts. The English version favours a fragmentary, often disjointed style, with simple everyday vocabulary and frequent repetition, while the French version uses more sophisticated syntax and more specialised and varied lexis. There are also differences in content; the English version often remains more implicit than the French and yet provides more horrific details, and it frequently opts for foreignization where the French features the strategy of domestication. It is suggested that these contrasts reflect the ways in which the novelists’ own voices have influenced the way in which they express the voice of Choukri.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".