literary_translation v1.0.0

name: "literary_translation" description: "Translate a literary work chapter by chapter: analyse the source before drafting, keep a living glossary for names, terms and voice markers, draft hard lines in alternatives, and review each chapter against the source. Ships glossary and consistency checker tools, worked chapter examples in Spanish to English and French to English, and a voice preservation checklist. Triggers on translate a novel, literary translation, translating a book or chapter, or keeping a translation consistent across chapters."

Literary Translation

Purpose

Carry a book across languages without losing its voice or its consistency. A chapter by chapter method does three jobs a single pass cannot: it forces a read of the source before any drafting, it turns every naming and wording decision into a written record the next chapter can follow, and it gives each chapter a review pass grounded in the source text instead of memory.

The method rests on named positions, set out with sources in references/translation-theory.md. Schleiermacher's 1813 choice between moving the reader toward the writer and moving the writer toward the reader. Venuti's names for those poles, domestication and foreignization (1995). Nida's process of analysis, transfer and restructuring, and his warning that meaning comes before style. Pick a position for the book, write it down, and hold it.

Workflow

1. Set the project brief before chapter 1. Record: source and target language, source edition, audience, the direction position (what gets kept foreign, what gets adapted, class by class for names, food, money, titles, school and legal terms), rights and credit terms, and the delivery format per chapter. Get the agreement in writing before starting work. The ATA, ALTA and PEN America model contracts are the starting point for terms.

1. Measure, do not guess, the pace. Translate one hard chapter fully, time it, and build the schedule from that rate. Text difficulty varies too much for a borrowed words per day figure to mean anything.

1. Start the living glossary. Run bin/glossary.py init glossary.csv, then add entries as decisions are made. Categories are name, place, term, voice, realia and other. Every entry carries the approved target rendering, any forbidden variants from rejected drafts, a one line reason, and the chapter where it first appeared. The tool blocks a second, different target for a settled source item, which is the point: change a decision on purpose in the file, never by drift.

1. Fill the voice sheet before drafting. Work through references/voice-preservation-checklist.md from the source text only: narrator, sentence shape, diction, dialogue habits, time and tense. Each answer needs a quoted source example. A voice sheet written from impressions will not survive chapter 10.

1. Analyse each chapter before drafting it. Copy assets/chapter-worksheet.md per chapter. Write what happens, where point of view or time shifts, which passages are hardest, and which names and motifs arrive or return. Divide the chapter into passages at scene, time or voice breaks and draft passage by passage, not in one unbroken run.

1. Draft hard lines in alternatives. For any line flagged hard (idiom, wordplay, tense knot, culture item, rhythm, deliberate ambiguity), write two or three full drafts, choose one, and record the reason and the rejects. Worked examples of this in two language pairs, Garcia Marquez in Gregory Rabassa's English and Flaubert in three published English versions, are in references/worked-examples.md. The rejects matter: add the losing renderings to the glossary as forbidden variants where a later chapter could repeat them.

1. Keep the glossary alive while drafting. Look up before you render, not after: bin/glossary.py lookup glossary.csv <word>. Add a new decision the moment you make it. Names are not translated unless the book has an established target name, diminutives and forms of address get their own rows, and a repeated source word that is a motif gets a voice row so it stays the same word in English every time.

1. Run the consistency check at the end of every chapter. bin/consistency_check.py --glossary glossary.csv --source ch01_source.txt --target ch01_target.txt reports forbidden variants as errors and glossary items that appear in the source but whose approved rendering never appears in the target as warnings. Fix every error. Read every warning by hand against the passage: a pronoun or a deliberate cut can be right, a silent rename is not.

1. Review in three passes, in this order. First a comparative read of the draft against the source, sampling at least three pages closely for omissions, additions and softened force. Second a target only read for coherence and prose that sounds written, not translated. Third read the whole chapter aloud and mark anything the mouth stumbles on. Do not use back translation as the main check for fiction: it rewards literal wording and punishes the restructuring good prose needs.

1. Close the chapter cleanly. Update the glossary and voice sheet with everything this chapter taught, log open queries for the author or editor in the worksheet, and run bin/glossary.py check glossary.csv. Only then start the next chapter. File the source chapter, draft, worksheet and glossary version together so a second translator or a later volume can pick the book up.

Output Contract

Deliver per chapter, in this order:

1. The translated chapter, clean, in the agreed format.
2. The updated glossary file, with new entries, deliberate changes and their reasons.
3. The filled chapter worksheet: source analysis, passage plan, hard lines with alternatives and the chosen reason for each.
4. The consistency check output for the chapter, with every warning annotated as checked and either accepted with a reason or fixed.
5. A short chapter note: voice risks spotted, strategy calls made, and open queries that need a human decision before the next chapter.

For a sample or audition translation, deliver items 1, 3 and 5 for the sample chapter plus a one paragraph statement of the book's direction position.

Operating Rules

1. Analyse before drafting, every chapter. A draft started from a skim imports the skim into the book.

1. Never invent source facts. If a realia item, historical reference or allusion is unclear, research it from a primary or reference source, or flag it as a query. Do not smooth it into something plausible.

1. Hold the direction position. If a passage seems to demand breaking it, break it once, on purpose, and write the exception and its reason in the worksheet. Drift is the failure, not the exception.

1. Consistency is a promise to the reader. Repeated names, spellings, motif words and forms of address stay fixed unless the source changes them. The checker's forbidden list is how rejected drafts stay rejected.

1. Match force, not wording, for insults, humour and taboo. A dictionary equivalent with half the force is a mistranslation even when the meaning looks right.

1. Do not add what the author left out: no thought tags on free indirect style, no explanations inside the text that the source did not carry, no added transitions. Put needed help in a note or a glossary, and only if the edition allows notes.

1. Credit and rights are part of the job, not admin afterthoughts. Set translator credit, including cover and metadata where negotiable, in the agreement at the start.

1. The tools check strings, not quality. A clean consistency run proves the glossary was followed. It proves nothing about voice, rhythm or accuracy, which is why the three review passes are not optional.