Week 1: What makes it wrong

This week

Bench

24 February 2027 First specimen establishing the claim

Slides

Open the deck

Specimens

出口 EXPORT

出口 / EXPORT secondary

A wall with nothing written on it cannot be wrong. A sign reading 出口 and nothing else cannot be wrong in English, because it never offered any English. A sign reading 出口 EXPORT can, because somewhere a promise was made that the second line carries the first.

That promise is where every specimen in this course begins, and half of what looks like a mistranslation turns out on inspection to be a promise nobody actually made.

Outline#

• the contract: who promised what, to whom, and how you establish that they did
• three verification levels, and why apocryphal is a finding rather than a failure
• what a record has to contain for someone else to re-check it
• 出口 EXPORT, read twice: once as a joke, once as evidence