Chapter 3. Thirty-odd Kinds of Materials: The Logic of Their Classification — Why Pride and Prejudice Became Thirty-Five

In the previous installment we drew the broad picture of six stages. The most labor-intensive of them was Stage 5: building the thirty-odd kinds of materials around a work’s world. This installment is about the logic by which those materials are classified, and why that logic produced a total of thirty-five for Pride and Prejudice.

Some Works Need a Dictionary of Marriage; Others Need a Dictionary of Whaling

First, one point must be clear: we do not make every material for every work.

Among the materials for Pride and Prejudice is “A Reconstruction of Meryton’s Shopping Street.” It rebuilds the fictional country town that often appears in the novel by combining period research and fragments from the text. It is decisively useful when translating Pride and Prejudice. But there is no Meryton in Moby-Dick, and no reason to make this material for Moby-Dick.

Conversely, Moby-Dick has a “Dictionary of Whaling Roles”: a document that organizes the exact duties, English titles, and Korean translations of the hierarchy aboard a nineteenth-century American whaling ship—captain, mate, harpooner, apprentice, and the like. There is no whaling ship in Pride and Prejudice. Making it would merely add another page in which to lose one’s way.

That different works need different materials sounds obvious. Yet once work begins, the question “Exactly what should we make, and what should we omit?” is difficult every time. Decide improvisationally and a material appears for one work but vanishes for the next; another may never have been made, only to prove later that every work needed it.

So we turned the classification of materials into a procedure. It has four layers.

Layer 1 — The Eight-Part Common Core: The Skeleton of Every Work

At the innermost level is the common core: eight kinds we make regardless of work, genre, or period. They are the work’s skeleton; without them, the other materials have nowhere to attach.

Here they are briefly.

Character relationship map — family trees by household and arcs of essential relationships, showing at a glance who is whose wife, friend, or enemy. In Pride and Prejudice, it marks seven groups: the Bennets, Darcys, Bingleys, Collins–Lucases, Gardiners, and the militia.

Chronology — the work’s map of time. Forty-one background events before the novel begins and forty-nine main events are arranged in order; characters’ ages are established here.

Complete character list — without omission, from named figures to people known only by roles such as “the maid at Longbourn.” In Pride and Prejudice, thirty-five named figures plus thirty unnamed roles make a sixty-five-person index.

Complete place list — every place in the work. Pride and Prejudice has fifty-three, organized into places directly shown (Longbourn, Pemberley) and places only mentioned (Brighton, Newcastle).

Complete object list — classified carriages, card games, instruments, clothing, food, letters, furniture, and more. Pride and Prejudice has eighty-nine.

Chapter-by-chapter translation guide — one page per chapter: summary, locations and figures present, event numbers occurring there, one or two key lines, words at risk of mistranslation, and the location of relevant materials. It is what a translator opens most often; all sixty-one chapters of Pride and Prejudice received one.

Dictionary for avoiding mistranslation of period language — words whose meanings change by era, organized by risk grade. In Pride and Prejudice, “tolerable” is marked [risk]: in 1813, it does not carry the same implication as modern English “bearable.”

Guide to honorifics and tone — the hierarchy of Mr., Mrs., Miss, Sir, and Lady, together with changes in the forms by which each character is addressed.

These are Layer 1: common to every work. The same eight are made for Pride and Prejudice, Moby-Dick, Frankenstein, and City of God.

Layer 2 — Genre Packs: One Set for Each Genre

Once a work’s primary genre is determined, a matching set of materials is added. The number and content of materials differ by set.

The general novel pack adds five: a narrator guide (narrative mode and sites of free indirect discourse), a nuance list (sentences whose surface and actual meanings differ), a recurring-motif tracker (words and images that recur and change meaning), a collection of letters (a complete analysis of letters in the work), and a character-psychology change curve (the protagonist’s trajectory of changing recognition).

The drama pack adds four different materials: a stage-direction guide, prosody analysis (iambic pentameter, rhyme, and enjambment in Shakespearean works), estimated stage movement, and a list of soliloquies and asides.

The epistolary pack differs again: speaker guides by sender, delivery-lag tracking, and frame-structure analysis.

The philosophy and theology pack has five: a core-concepts dictionary, source dictionary for quotations, argument map, list of opponents, and original-language/translation-language correspondence table.

The children’s literature pack has three: wordplay translation strategies, a map of fantasy logic, and a reader-age layer chart.

There are also separate packs for epic poetry, SF/fantasy, mysteries, and memoirs. A work takes only the set that fits its genre.

Pride and Prejudice is a novel, so the five materials of the novel pack were added. Had it been a play, hypothetically, the four materials of the drama pack would have been used instead.

Layer 3 — Period Packs: One Volume for Each Period of a Work

For each period inside a work, we add a separate period encyclopedia. It contains the felt realities of daily life, travel, marriage, and money that are natural only to someone who has lived in that period—information not directly described in the text, but necessary to understand why characters act as they do.

Our period packs include, roughly, encyclopedias for late antiquity, the Middle Ages, Renaissance city-states, the seventeenth century, the Enlightenment eighteenth century, the Regency, the Victorian era, the Edwardian era, the interwar years, nineteenth-century Russia, and nineteenth-century America.

If a work spans two periods, we create subsections within one volume. Frankenstein, for example, is set in the late eighteenth century but was written in the early Romantic period (1816–1818), so its eighteenth-century encyclopedia includes a Romantic-period supplement.

Pride and Prejudice is set between 1811 and 1813. We therefore added one Regency-period encyclopedia. It contains the five meals and their times (breakfast, no lunch, dinner, tea, supper), types and speeds of carriages, legal procedures for marriage, the social-season calendar, purchasing power of money, changes in clothing, and fine gradations of social address.

The novel does not directly say “dinner was usually around four.” But when Elizabeth tries to leave Netherfield before four, a translator who does not know what that hour means cannot carry the tension of the scene into Korean. The period encyclopedia is a tool for preserving such tension.

Layer 4 — Motif Packs: Added for Each Central Motif

The final layer consists of materials added according to a work’s central motifs. For each motif rated intensity three or above in Stage 1 profiling, one or two materials are added.

Motif	Added materials
Class	Dictionary of objects as class symbols
Marriage	Economics of marriage: dowry, settlement, allowance
Navigation	Maritime terminology, ship plans, role dictionary
Court	Dictionary of legal institutions
Duel	Guide to dueling customs
Religion	Parish and clergy system
Medicine	Period medical dictionary
Fantasy, dreams	Map of fantasy logic
Foreign words	Work-specific language dictionary
Architecture, space	Floor plans, scene sets, gardens
Servants	Servant-system diagram
Food culture	Menus and dining customs
Clothing	Clothing inventory
Music	Music and sound environment
Bodily etiquette	Dictionary of bodily-language etiquette
Emotion vocabulary	Korean–English emotion-vocabulary correspondence table

Foreign-language materials are especially particular. Even the same “foreign-word dictionary” changes language with the work. For Pride and Prejudice it is French, the cultivated language of the nineteenth-century English upper class. Frankenstein mixes German and French; City of God has Latin and Greek; Moby-Dick combines nautical vocabulary with Latin, Hebrew, and Greek roots. The foreign languages in the work become the languages of the materials.

Twelve motifs in Pride and Prejudice rated three or above, reducing to fifteen kinds of material. Some motifs are grouped in one resource; others branch into several files. Architecture and space, for instance, become three files: floor plans, scene sets, and gardens.

Adding Up the Thirty-Five for Pride and Prejudice

Now let us calculate the total for Pride and Prejudice.

Common core 8 + novel pack 5 + Regency encyclopedia 1 + motif pack 15 = 29 kinds

Six work-specific supplements outside the standard classification were then added. They are discoveries unique to Pride and Prejudice.

The most striking is the complete list of unspecified referents. The novel’s style is rich in pronouns and demonstratives: “it,” “that matter,” “this person,” and similar ambiguous references appear several times on a page. If one does not know exactly what an “it” in a sentence refers to, the translation slips. We therefore tracked every ambiguous demonstrative in the work and specified its referent. Most works scarcely need this; Pride and Prejudice required it.

Other supplements include a complete group list (an index of families, classes, and factions); a complete miscellany list (dances, temporal markers, abstract concepts); a list of anachronistic forbidden words; hidden networks of character relationships; and character-, event-, and place-relation maps.

One adaptation guide was added as well. Because Pride and Prejudice is frequently adapted for drama and film, we prepared a guide for adaptation in addition to translation.

29 + six work-specific supplements + one adaptation guide = 35 kinds in total

Thirty-five is a result determined by the work’s character in Stage 1 profiling. We did not impose thirty-five kinds on the work; it is closer to saying that the work told us it needed thirty-five.

How Totals Differ for Other Works

Apply the same procedure elsewhere and it yields different results.

Romeo and Juliet has about eighteen kinds: common core 8 + drama pack 4 + Renaissance period 1 + motifs (duel, marriage, religion, medicine) 4 + a small amount of reinforcement. As a play, its prosody analysis is the heaviest item, and its motif materials are half those of Pride and Prejudice.

Moby-Dick has about twenty-four: common core 8 + novel pack 5 + nineteenth-century America 1 + motifs including three maritime materials, religion, medicine, science, and multiethnicity + a separate appendix for the ETYMOLOGY section. The three maritime materials are its largest difference from Pride and Prejudice.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has about fifteen: common core 8 + children’s pack 3 + a light Victorian encyclopedia 1 + a fantasy-logic map + an abbreviated legal-satire edition + parody-source comparison. Its own length is short and its focus clear, so it needs the fewest materials.

The six stages and four-layer classification are the same; the kinds and number of materials produced differ by work.

Why Thirty-Five Is Neither Too Few nor Too Many

One final brief point. If there are too few materials, a translator has no page to open when blocked. If there are too many, the materials themselves become lost and no one knows where anything is. In both cases, the materials fail to function as materials.

Our standard is simple: a volume and classification through which a translator blocked by one word or one scene can find an answer within thirty minutes. For Pride and Prejudice, thirty-five kinds were that balance point. For Romeo and Juliet, it is eighteen; for Moby-Dick, twenty-four. Each work has its own balance point.

Finding that balance is the real work of Stage 5: not filling materials, but designing the structure of materials.

From the next installment, we will directly open the Pride and Prejudice work folder. The next landscape is how those thirty-five kinds of materials actually establish their household.