Bibliographic record
Abstract
Interpreters are often anonymously and flimsily archived, given their subsidiary role in diplomatic exchanges. These fragmentary records pose problems for in-depth studies on ancient interpreters. Japanese monk Ennin’s (794-864) diary documenting his decade-long (838-847) China sojourn, however, provides a delightful contrast to this evidence limitation. Known for its authentic, detailed, and objective descriptions, it contains thirty-eight references to four Sillan (ancient Korean) interpreters, of whom one was an interpreting clerk affiliated with a prefecture in eastern coastal China. He was also Ennin’s longest-serving interpreter, from 839 through 847, having been documented twenty-three times. This interpreting functionary, Yu Sinǒn, worked in a regional office of a Sillan enclave and assisted visitors from Japan and Silla. His work, apart from language mediation, included liaising, trading, logistics and message go-betweens. As a civil servant, this Sillan interpreter was expected to be law-abiding. Yet in his mediating services for Ennin, he frequently flouted the legal limits. In the process, he was given monetary rewards, although later textual hints suggest that his mediation for the Japanese monks was primarily based on goodwill and friendship. The detailed descriptions in Ennin’s travelogue offer us first-hand information about an interpreting official’s infringements of the Tang Chinese laws. However, was it not exactly his official position, with easy access to institutional networks and legal bureaucracy, which enabled him to work around the loopholes? This case of an interpreter and his patron provides valuable evidence for the development of their initial professional ties and subsequent personal bonding. It also speaks of the arbitrary boundaries between interpreting officials and civilian interpreters in first-millennium East Asian exchanges.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".