Chapter 7. The Path by Which Thirty-Five Kinds of Materials Were Determined

In the previous installment, we saw material that decides a sentence’s fork once and for all: an approach in which materials hold not only the weight of words but also sentence structure. This time we step back up and follow how every kind and number of material for Pride and Prejudice was determined.

This installment pairs with Chapter 3. Chapter 3 set out the logic of four-layer classification; Chapter 7 shows, step by step, the total produced when that classification is applied to one volume of Pride and Prejudice.

First Decision — The Work Profile Determines Everything

The starting point for material decisions is the Stage 1 work profile, a two-page document. It records five things:

Genre: novel (general) — social novel + romance + coming-of-age novel Period: Regency (1811–1813) Culture: England — Hertfordshire, Kent, Derbyshire, London Central motifs: twelve at intensity grade 3 or above, including class, marriage, family, letters, servants, food culture, clothing, music, bodily etiquette, foreign words (French), free indirect discourse, and narrative irony Translation difficulty: many period expressions / long complex sentences / difficult speaker identification through free indirect discourse

How these five points become a list of thirty-five kinds of materials is the story of this installment. Let us follow, line by line, how the materials are determined.

Eight Are Decided Automatically — The Common Core

The first step is hardly a decision at all. The eight kinds of common core are added automatically for every work. For Pride and Prejudice, they enter unchanged:

character relationship map, chronology, complete character list, complete place list, complete object list, chapter-by-chapter translation guide, period-language mistranslation-prevention dictionary, honorific and tone translation guide.

These eight form the work’s skeleton: who characters are, how time moves, and how words should be carried across are the most basic facts needed to translate any work. Even when a work’s character differs, the eight remain the same. If we worked on Moby-Dick, these eight would come first there too.

At this point: 8 kinds.

Once Genre Is Decided, One Set Is Added — Five Kinds in the Novel Pack

Next comes genre. The first line of the work profile, “novel (general),” produces the second decision.

The material set for novels has five kinds:

Narrator guide — a complete list of who narrates, in what mode, and where free indirect discourse occurs. Nuance list — tracking sentences whose surface and actual meanings differ. Recurring-motif tracker — tracking repeated words and images whose meanings change. Epistolary collection — a complete analysis of letters in the work. Character-psychology change curve — the trajectory of the protagonist’s changing recognition.

Because Pride and Prejudice is a novel, these five were added. 8 + 5 = 13 kinds.

Had Pride and Prejudice, hypothetically, been a play, this set would be replaced by the four materials of the drama pack: stage-direction guide, prosody analysis, estimated stage movement, and lists of soliloquies and asides. Had it been an epistolary novel, guides by sender and delivery-lag tracking would be added. A work’s primary genre determines which set it receives.

Once Period Is Decided, One Volume Is Added — The Regency Encyclopedia

The third decision is period. The profile’s second line, “Regency (1811–1813),” makes it.

A work set in the Regency receives one Regency-period encyclopedia. This one volume organizes the timing of five meals, types and speeds of carriages, legal procedures for marriage, the social-season calendar, purchasing power, and the evolution of clothing.

Pride and Prejudice receives this encyclopedia. 13 + 1 = 14 kinds.

Had the work been Frankenstein, it would receive an eighteenth-century encyclopedia with a Romantic-period supplement. Moby-Dick would receive a nineteenth-century American encyclopedia, with whaling overwhelmingly prominent. City of God would receive a late-antiquity encyclopedia. A work’s period decides which encyclopedia it receives.

Once Motifs Are Decided, Several Kinds Are Added — Fifteen Kinds

The fourth decision is the most complex and produces the most materials per work. It comes from the fourth line of the profile: “twelve central motifs.”

Let us pair the twelve motifs rated grade 3 or above in Pride and Prejudice with their materials.

Class → dictionary of objects as class symbols Marriage → marriage economics (dowry, settlement, allowance) Family → included in the character relationship map (common core); no separate material Letters → epistolary collection (already in the novel pack) Servants → estimated servant-system diagram Food culture → estimated menus and food culture Clothing → estimated clothing inventory Music → estimated music and sound environment Bodily etiquette → dictionary of bodily-language etiquette Foreign words (French) → French foreign-word dictionary Free indirect discourse → narrator guide (already in novel pack) Narrative irony → nuance list (already in novel pack)

Four of the twelve motifs—family, letters, free indirect discourse, and narrative irony—are already covered by other materials, so they add none separately. The other eight bring eight kinds of material.

In addition, architecture and space, an especially strong additional motif in Pride and Prejudice, branch into three materials: estimated floor plans for central estates such as Pemberley, Rosings, and Netherfield; scene-set diagrams for central scenes such as balls, proposals, and dinners; and gardens and landscaping, because gardens operate as mirrors of character in the novel. That adds 3.

One more material rebuilds Meryton, the fictional country town that recurs in the work, by joining period standards to textual fragments: estimated Meryton shopping street.

One more is estimated religious life, for Collins’s clerical activity.

Finally, estimated character daily schedules organize the Bennets’ weekday routine, Darcy’s Pemberley routine, and Collins’s Hunsford routine by time of day, reinforcing the period encyclopedia.

Together the motif materials are 8 + 3 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 15 kinds. 14 + 15 = 29 kinds.

Six Supplements Outside the Standard

Up to this point, materials are determined by the four-layer standard classification. But while working on Pride and Prejudice, we found materials not in that standard but indispensable to this work.

The most striking is the complete list of unspecified referents. The novel’s style is rich in pronouns and demonstratives: “it,” “that matter,” and “this person” can occur repeatedly on one page. Translation slips when one does not know precisely what an “it” refers to, so we made material that tracks every ambiguous referent in the work and specifies its target.

This is almost unnecessary for other works. Moby-Dick has an explicit narrator, requiring little pronoun tracking; City of God has precise argumentative naming and few ambiguous referents. But it was decisive for Pride and Prejudice: an example of material unique to a work and outside standard classification.

Five more kinds join it:

Complete group list — an index of families, classes, and factions: military groups (militia, regular army), households (Bennets, Darcys, Bingleys), social classes (gentry, merchants), and informal factions. Complete miscellany list — items not belonging to objects, characters, places, or groups: dances, time markers such as “Michaelmas,” and abstract concepts such as “establishment.” Anachronistic forbidden words — terms absent in the 1810s or carrying different meanings, excluded from translation vocabulary; a reinforcement of the period-language dictionary. Hidden network of character relationships — implicit relations not explicitly developed in the work, such as Mrs. Gardiner having lived in Derbyshire before marriage and knowing Pemberley’s former owner: brief mentions with large implications. Character/event/place relation map — a reinforcement combining character relationship map and chronology: a matrix of who was where and when.

These six are work-specific supplements. 29 + 6 = 35 kinds.

One Extra Volume — The Adaptation Guide

Pride and Prejudice is frequently adapted for drama and film. In addition to translation, we therefore wrote one adaptation guide, organizing scenes that must remain, scenes that may be compressed or omitted, and priorities for visualization.

It is not part of the four-layer standard and is not used directly for translation, but it naturally occupies a place in the Pride and Prejudice work folder.

35 + 1 = 36 files in the folder. We usually say “thirty-five kinds” because the adaptation guide lies outside standard classification and is not directly connected to translation.

Compressing the Decision Path into One Line

The whole path can be compressed as follows:

Common core 8 + novel pack 5 + Regency encyclopedia 1 + motif pack 15 + work-specific supplements 6 = 35 kinds

Every decision comes from one line in the work profile. The genre line brings five kinds; the period line one; twelve motifs fifteen; discoveries unique to the work six. We did not arbitrarily choose the number thirty-five. The character of Pride and Prejudice told us it needed thirty-five kinds.

How Totals Differ for Other Works

Apply the same decision path to other works and the totals differ.

Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet — common 8 + drama pack 4 + Renaissance encyclopedia 1 + duel, marriage, religion, and medicine 4 + small supplements = about 18 kinds. Because it is a play, prosody analysis is heaviest; motif materials are half those of Pride and Prejudice.

Melville, Moby-Dick — common 8 + novel pack 5 + nineteenth-century American encyclopedia 1 + maritime, religion, medicine, science, and multiethnicity motifs = about 24 kinds. Its greatest difference is that maritime material alone has three kinds: terminology, structural plans, and roles.

Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment — common 8 + novel pack 4 (reduced epistolary collection) + nineteenth-century Russian encyclopedia 1 + court, religion, class, medicine, and St. Petersburg geography = about 22 kinds. The Russian Table of Ranks (chin) occupies half the honorific guide.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein — common 8 + epistolary pack 3 + eighteenth-century encyclopedia (Romantic supplement) 1 + science, medicine, religion, and travel = about 19 kinds. Its epistolary frame makes delivery-lag tracking decisive.

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — common 8 + children’s pack 3 + light Victorian encyclopedia 1 + fantasy logic + legal satire + parody-source comparison = about 15 kinds. The work itself is short and tightly focused, so it requires the fewest materials.

Augustine, City of God — common 8 + theology pack 5 + late-antiquity encyclopedia 1 + religion, Latin/Greek dictionary, and editorial-preface management = about 18 kinds. Its character relationship map is unusually reinterpreted as a map of quoters and targets of refutation.

The six stages and four-layer classification remain the same, yet each work outputs different kinds and amounts of material. Saying a work calls for its own materials is not metaphor; it is the result of procedure.

From the next installment, we enter Part 3: opening the thirty-five materials made for Pride and Prejudice one kind at a time. We begin with the thirteen most general and reusable kinds—the common core eight made for every work and the five made for novels.