Rosetta: from comparative reader to editorial instrument

[](https://firstpair.org/books/rosetta/)

First Pair has published Rosetta: Comparative Voice Engineering as Editorial Method, our scholarly account of a research program that began with three voices for Lighthouse Republics, became the rights-aware LitVoice toolkit, and then became a Russian translation-review system for The Invented Enemy.

The article explains the origin of the South civic-documentary voice, the quieter East and sparer West experiments, the limits of author-name shorthand, and the scoring rails that let several complete editions remain readable at once. It also describes the Russian F/R/C Rosetta: Fable, Codex Review, and Codex aligned across 2,633 chunks, with separate measures for surface obstacles, textual divergence, corpus distance, equality, and human judgment.

Rosetta has now grown from a comparative reader into a complete editorial instrument. The current process preserves a simple rule: generated editions are evidence; editorial choices are a separate, source-bound record; accepted prose returns to the canonical manuscript only through a deliberate revision and rebuild.

The current editing grammar

Every editable comparison exposes decisions at four scales without changing any displayed edition:

1. Overall chooses one pane for the complete aligned fragment.
2. Sentence & words reveals sentence-level preferences and a Words control for each nonempty unit.
3. Whole sentence selects the unit; word checkboxes select a contiguous phrase; Only selects one word directly.
4. The selected wording can be marked Good, Bad, or Edit.

Phrase records are independent. A sentence may contain several saved phrases, and a new phrase may overlap, nest inside, or cross an earlier one without erasing it. Clicking a saved edited highlight reopens its variants beneath the action row. Save & replace updates the preferred wording in place; Save next retains the earlier proposal and adds another. Stacked checkboxes select one preferred variant while preserving the alternatives as editorial evidence.

Headings participate in the same system. A Heading badge distinguishes a structural title from repeated navigation context, so a heading such as Слово с двумя назначениями can be selected, judged, and revised directly.

There is no generic “preserve previous choices” operation in the ordinary workflow. Reader pages are reproducible; decisions live in a separate three-file record: a machine-readable ledger, its integrity sidecar, and a readable digest. The record is bound to the project, exact source content, alignment contract, panes, sentences, tokens, and target spans. A mismatched or partially updated record fails closed instead of being guessed into a new edition.

Reader and Review are different kinds of work

Reader keeps the alternatives in context. Its pinned navigation connects Previous, Up, Back, Top, Contents, Next, and the peer Review view. Desktop layouts preserve simultaneous comparison: the Russian vault gives long sentences full measure in vertically stacked F/R/C panes, while the Lighthouse vault keeps its configured edition columns and divergence rails. Mobile editions use horizontally snapping panes, direct edition tabs, and a visible next-pane edge. Preview vaults use the same control grammar on a bounded, inspectable corpus before it is applied to a complete editorial vault.

Review gathers only pages with decisions and turns those decisions into the appropriate next-stage artifact. The two projects intentionally do not pretend to have the same reconstruction semantics.

For The Invented Enemy, Review starts from Codex Review (R). An editor can leave most of R untouched, prefer another whole fragment or sentence where needed, and cherry-pick exact phrases from F, R, or C. Bad remains feedback and never enters the copy. A Good selection or the preferred Edit variant enters the candidate only after Use in copy maps it to an exact, non-overlapping destination in the currently effective base. Review then produces an inspectable R-first new-copy preview and can export Markdown plus JSON provenance. It never silently modifies F, R, or C.

For Lighthouse Republics, the aligned objects are conceptual lineages rather than a lossless manuscript stream. The same Overall, sentence, word, phrase, judgment, and variant controls therefore feed a deterministic next-edition instruction digest. Review links every instruction back to its fragment and pane, but does not fabricate a manuscript by concatenating lineages whose source order may split, fuse, repeat, or move.

In both profiles, the durable workflow is:

1. compare in Reader;
2. record decisions at the smallest useful scale;
3. inspect every touched page in Review;
4. export a candidate copy or instruction digest;
5. apply accepted changes to the canonical source;
6. rebuild the book, scores, EPUBs, and vaults under a new source identity.

That final boundary is central. Rosetta can make an editorial decision precise, portable, and reviewable. It does not make the decision disappear into automation.

Read the research

The full article includes the Lighthouse Republics voice lineage, the creation of LitVoice, the Rosetta alignment and scoring model, Kindle-scale page renders, desktop and mobile vault views, the Russian corpus and N-gram work, claim verification, and the F/R/C translation case study.

Read Rosetta: Comparative Voice Engineering as Editorial Method on First Pair.