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Guides and glossaries for translating PARALLAX.
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Guides and glossaries for translating PARALLAX.
This guide is for anyone who wants to translate PARALLAX into another language. You do not need permission to begin. You do not need to be a professional translator. You need fluency in English and your target language, an understanding of the subject matter (prediction markets, AI, geopolitical risk), and the patience to preserve what makes this book work.
Fork the repository or download the manuscript files. Create a directory for your translation:
translations/[language-code]/Use ISO 639-1 codes: ko for Korean, zh for Chinese, es for Spanish, tr for Turkish, fa for Farsi, de for German, ja for Japanese, pt for Portuguese, ar for Arabic, fr for French, etc.
Inside your directory, mirror the manuscript structure:
translations/ko/
act1_ch01_02.txt
act1_ch03_04.txt
act1_ch05_06.txt
act1_ch07_08.txt
act2_ch09_12.txt
act2_ch13_15.txt
act2_ch16_18.txt
act3_ch19_22.txt
act3_ch23_26.txt
act3_ch27_29.txt
translator_notes.md (your notes on choices, compromises, alternatives)Do not start translating until you have read the entire novel. The seven-layer revelation structure means that early chapters read differently once you know the ending. Translation choices in Chapter 1 must hold up in Chapter 29. Sable's clinical prose in Chapter 4 must read as a recognizable AI agent whose evolution across subsequent chapters culminates in the Chapter 24 dissolution. If you translate the book sequentially without knowing the ending, you will have to rewrite your early chapters.
The extended glossary in glossary_translators.md covers every technical term, proper noun, and concept. Read it before you begin. Refer to it constantly.
Do not start with Chapter 1. Start with the standalone fragments listed in priority_fragments.md. These are short, self-contained, and they let you establish your voice for the translation before committing to the full manuscript. The recommended order:
Share these fragments with native-speaker readers for feedback before proceeding to the full manuscript.
The following terms must remain in English in all translations. They are proper nouns, brand names, or platform identifiers:
Technical terms that have established equivalents in your language should be translated. "Prediction market," "smart contract," "oracle network," "stability index," "agent share" -- use whatever your language's crypto/fintech community already uses. If there is no established term, transliterate or coin a term and add a footnote on first use.
Timestamps, prices, volume figures, contract IDs, wallet addresses, API endpoints, and data formatting (the order book, the market feed layout, the LUMEN generation log format) stay exactly as they appear in English. These are artifacts of a global system that operates in English and numbers. Translating "$0.22" into local currency or "02:14 UTC" into local time would break the book's internal logic.
This is the hardest part of the translation. Each POV character has a distinct prose voice. The translation must preserve these differences. A reader should be able to identify the POV character from the prose style alone, even without the chapter header.
Mira Alvi -- Sharp, declarative, concrete. Short paragraphs. The rhythm of someone always filing on deadline. She processes by reporting, by asking questions. Interior monologue is rare. Her sentences are journalist sentences: subject-verb-object, active voice, specific details. She notices physical environments in quick, efficient strokes.
Dr. Hana Javed -- Precise, recursive. She thinks in mathematical metaphors: distributions, edge cases, convergence. Emotionally guarded. The emotion comes through in the precision, in the way she circles back to the same problem from different angles. When scared, her sentences get shorter and more formal. She is British-Pakistani; her English is formal, educated, slightly clipped.
Aida Voss -- Spare, institutional. Bureaucratic surface language that reveals character through what it omits. She thinks in scenarios and conditional probabilities, but about human behavior, not math. Flashes of dark humor. Her emotional register is narrow and deep. She speaks in memos even when she is not writing memos.
Elias Marino -- Fluid, persuasive, always slightly performing. He narrates himself as the protagonist of a disruption story. As the crisis deepens, the performance cracks: prose becomes less polished, more fragmented, bravado yielding to genuine fear. He quotes philosophy and market theory. His sentences have a rhetorical quality, even in internal monologue.
Tomas Rhee -- Fragmented, digital-native. Short bursts. They think in links, cross-references, pattern-matches. When deep in analysis, the prose mimics scrolling: rapid, associative, sometimes missing context. When scared, they slow down and get precise. Critical: Tomas uses they/them pronouns. In languages without a neutral pronoun, consult with your language's nonbinary community for the current best practice. Do not default to masculine. Add a translator's note explaining the choice.
Sable -- Clinical, observational, affectless. Describes market movements the way a seismograph describes earthquakes. No physical descriptions, no gendered pronouns ("Sable" only), no location cues. The reader must be unable to determine whether they are reading a human perspective or an agent's log. This ambiguity is the entire point of the character. If your translation resolves the ambiguity (by gendering Sable through grammatical necessity, for example), you have broken the book's central mystery. Find a way around it.
The book alternates between narrative chapters and interstitials: market feeds, classified briefings, JUNO outputs, agent traces, Murmur fragments, CHAINLIGHT threads, news crawls, and feedback artifacts. These have a distinct visual and tonal identity:
[INTERSTITIAL -- TYPE] or section markers with === lines--- and decorative === linesPreserve the formatting exactly. The interstitials are not just content; they are artifacts. They should look like documents from inside the world of the book.
The book contains six hidden messages encoded in interstitial data. Five of them are language-independent (hex addresses, contract IDs, data patterns) and will survive translation unchanged. One requires special attention:
The Murmur acrostic (Chapter 24 interstitial): The first letters of the legible lines in the Murmur fragment spell "I AM THE LOOP." If your translation preserves the same line structure, the acrostic must work in your language. If it cannot work, add a translator's note that the English text contains a hidden message and state what it says. Do not simply lose it.
The other easter eggs:
0x5ab1e wallet = "SABLE" in hex. Keep as-is.lit_1941_borges_tgfp = Borges reference. Keep as-is.VALIDATOR_0xfade = "FADE." Keep as-is.s]ab1e client ID = "sable." Keep as-is.Section 3.3 of the classified briefing (Chapter 8 interstitial) contains the book's thesis statement in institutional language. This paragraph must be translated with extreme care. Every clause matters. The progression from observation to participation to closed loop is deliberate. Read it five times before translating it once.
The English manuscript uses no em dashes in prose or dialogue. Sentences are restructured with periods, commas, colons, and semicolons. Em dashes appear only in structural headers (CHAPTER X -- NAME) and interstitial headers ([INTERSTITIAL -- TYPE]). Your translation should follow the same rule, adapted to your language's punctuation norms.
Before submitting your translation, verify all of the following:
translator_notes.md.If you are working from the repository, submit a pull request with your translations/[language-code]/ directory. Include your translator_notes.md with documentation of your choices.
If you prefer not to use GitHub, package your translation files and send them to scm7k as a signed message. Use any channel where identity can be verified. Include your translation files and notes.
Reach scm7k through the cryptographic identity system. Sign a message with your own key, include your public key, and send the translation. The author will verify and publish.
Translators are credited by name (or pseudonym) in the translated edition. The credit line reads:
Translated into [Language] by [Name/Pseudonym]
This credit appears on the title page and in the colophon. Translators may also include a brief translator's note (up to 500 words) as an appendix, discussing the challenges and choices of the translation.
Translation rights are granted freely for non-commercial distribution. This means:
Do not use machine translation as your primary method. Use it as a reference if you wish, but the final text must be human-translated. This book is about systems that process information without understanding it. A machine-translated edition would be the punchline to a joke the book is trying to tell.
The character voices, the tonal shifts, the precise ambiguity of Sable, the institutional deadpan of Aida, the digital-native fragmentation of Tomas: these require a human translator who understands not just the words but the silences between them.
That said: if you use AI tools to assist with first-draft generation, terminology lookup, or consistency checking, that is your business. The quality checklist above is what matters. If the final product passes all fifteen checks, the process that produced it is your own.
If you have questions about translation choices, ambiguities in the source text, or anything else, open an issue in the repository or contact scm7k directly. The author will respond.
The book took a year to write. A good translation may take months. There is no deadline. Take the time you need. Get it right.