The operator produces findings in the grammar's own register — chip fields, domain-chain views, node classifications, pattern observations with pointers to cases. Inside the operator's working register, these artefacts carry their meaning unambiguously. A colleague who has absorbed the grammar reads them and understands what the operator has found, what it rests on, and what its limits are.
Findings do not stay inside the operator's register. They are read by audiences who have not absorbed the grammar: parliamentary readers, commissioning bodies, oversight committees, regulators, press, and eventually the wider public record. Each of these audiences reads in its own register. Each will interpret the finding according to what its register affords. A finding that was precise in the operator's register may be misread as an adjudication in a parliamentary register, as a forecast in a commissioning register, or as an accusation in a public register — not because the finding is wrong, but because the reader's register does things with the finding the operator did not author.
The operator is responsible for the register the finding lands in, not only the register it leaves in. This guide states what that responsibility requires.
Register as the reader's active contribution
A reader does not passively absorb a finding. The reader interprets it through the categories available in their register — the frames, expectations, and evidential standards their professional or social context supplies. A parliamentary reader's register contains categories like scandal, policy failure, accountability gap. A judicial reader's register contains liability, cause of action, burden of proof. A press reader's register contains story, lead, public interest.
The same finding, placed in each of these registers without translation, will be interpreted through the available categories. If the finding is a pattern observation — a load-bearing joint that carries chains across eight of ten cases — a parliamentary reader may interpret it as evidence of policy failure, a judicial reader may interpret it as evidence of institutional liability, a press reader may interpret it as a story about an institution's misconduct. None of these interpretations is necessarily what the operator authored. All of them are what the readers' registers produce when the finding lands in them untranslated.
The operator cannot control how a reader's register operates. The operator can control what the finding looks like when it enters the register — whether it provides the translation that lets the reader interpret it correctly, or whether it arrives without translation and is interpreted by default through whatever categories are most available.
This is not about dumbing findings down. Readers in adjacent registers are often more professionally sophisticated than the operator in their own domains. The issue is that sophistication in one register is not automatically competence in another. A senior parliamentary draftsman reading a registry finding without the grammar is not failing to understand; they are reading correctly within their own register, which is not the register the finding was produced in. The translation exists because the two registers differ, not because either is inferior.
What translation does not change
Translation adapts the finding's presentation; it does not change the finding's substance. The limits stated in guide 6 apply to the translated version as strictly as to the original.
A finding that does not adjudicate in the operator's register does not adjudicate in the translated version. A finding whose scope does not cover intent does not cover intent in the translation. A finding that carries a specific descent scope in the registry version carries that same descent scope in the parliamentary summary. If translation alters any of these, the translation has ceased to represent the finding and has become a different document — typically a stronger and less defensible one.
The operator must be able to state, for every translated version of a finding, what has changed between the original and the translation. If substance has changed, the translation is misrepresentation. If only register has changed, the translation is legitimate. The test is whether a reader moving back from the translation to the original would find the same claims with the same limits, or whether the translation has accreted claims or dropped limits that the original did not contain.
Translation techniques
Three techniques, in ascending order of translation distance from the original.
Retain the grammar with explanation
In some contexts — professional governance audiences, oversight bodies with analytical capacity, academic readers — the appropriate translation is to present findings in the grammar's own register, with an explanatory preface that names the grammar's categories and how to read them. The translation is minimal; the grammar does the work.
This technique is appropriate when the audience has the capacity and the time to engage with the grammar directly, and when precision matters more than accessibility. A parliamentary committee preparing terms of reference for an inquiry may want the full chip-field observation with explanation of the grammar, not a translated summary that might misrepresent what the observation actually supports.
Narrative translation with structural pointers
More commonly, the appropriate translation is a narrative summary of the finding in the target register, with explicit pointers back to the grammar's output for readers who want to verify. The narrative states what the observation is, in language the target register uses; the pointers allow a reader to descend from the narrative to the grammar to the primary evidence.
This is the technique for the majority of governance translations. It respects the reader's register while preserving the reader's ability to verify the finding against the underlying work. A parliamentary reader gets a narrative they can use; an analyst on their staff can follow the pointers and check the narrative against the chip-field evidence.
The discipline for this translation: the narrative states what the operator has found, not what the operator believes it means. The registry shows a pattern of suppression events concentrated at stage N across eight independent cases is a narrative statement of a structural observation. The data reveals systematic cover-up by body X is not a narrative translation; it is an adjudicative statement the instrument did not produce and the operator is not authorised to make.
Purely narrative with no grammar reference
In some contexts — public-facing summaries, press releases, materials intended for general audiences — the grammar's reference cannot appear at all without obscuring the meaning. Translation is then purely narrative. The structural observation is described in ordinary language, with enough specificity that it can be tested, but without the grammar's notation.
This technique is the most translation-intensive and the most dangerous. The safeguards: the narrative is drafted by the operator or under the operator's direct review, the narrative is tested against the original finding for substance preservation before release, and the narrative names the source of the observation so that readers who want to verify can route back to the governance-level documentation.
The public is not owed the grammar; the public is owed accuracy. A correctly translated public-facing statement conveys what was found without overstating what was found. An incorrectly translated statement either overstates — producing adjudication-seeming claims the instrument did not authorise — or understates, which wastes the governance work by making the finding less actionable than the evidence supports.
Preserving authorial sovereignty in translation
Findings produced from registry analysis reference individual cases. Translation affects how those references are handled.
In the operator's register, a pattern observation with pointers to eight contributing cases preserves each case's sovereignty by making the pointers explicit — each case is visible as its own authored unit, each case's author retains authority over what that case asserts, and the pattern observation is clearly the state user's synthesis across cases rather than a claim about any single case.
Translation can destroy this structure if the translator is careless. A narrative summary that merges eight cases into a single aggregated claim — in eight cases, the authorities consistently suppressed evidence — has collapsed authorial sovereignty. The eight individual authors have not been consulted; the translated claim asserts things about their cases the authors may not have authored; the cases' own voices have been replaced by the state user's aggregation.
The discipline: translation preserves the distinction between pattern observation and case claim. Pattern observation is the state user's authored work. Case claim is the individual author's authored work. A translation that correctly marks this distinction might read: The registry shows a recurring pattern, observed across eight independent cases, in which evidence appears to be suppressed at stage N of the process. Each of the eight cases asserts, in its own author's account, what it asserts about its specific circumstance. The first sentence is the state user's finding. The second sentence preserves the authors' sovereignty over their own claims. Both sentences survive the translation.
Where the translation constraint makes this distinction impractical — a forty-word press-release summary, a single-line briefing point — the operator's responsibility is to avoid the translation rather than to produce a version that misrepresents authorial sovereignty. Some observations cannot be translated into extreme compression without destroying substance. The operator refuses the compression and proposes a longer form, or declines the translation entirely.
The register hand-off
At some point the finding leaves the operator's control. It enters the register of whoever receives it next. That receiver has their own responsibility for how they handle it in their register, but the operator's responsibility does not end at the hand-off; it extends to what the finding looked like when it entered the receiver's register.
A finding handed off in the grammar's native register to a receiver who cannot read the grammar has been handed off irresponsibly. The receiver will either misread it or discard it; in either case the operator's work has been wasted, and the operator has contributed to the waste by failing to translate.
A finding handed off in a translation that misrepresents the original has been handed off more than irresponsibly. It has been handed off misleadingly, and the operator is responsible for the misleading even if the misleading was inadvertent.
A finding handed off in a correct translation, with clear indication of the original grammar-register source and the path back to it, has been handed off correctly. The receiver can work with the translation in their register, and can descend to the original when precision is required. The operator has discharged their responsibility at the hand-off.
Every translated version of a finding carries a route back to the grammar-register original. The route must be discoverable by a reader who wants to verify the translation, and must be maintained for as long as the translation is in circulation. A translation that cannot be traced back to its original has become an independent claim unmoored from the instrument's evidential basis.
Translation as operator work
Translation is part of the operator's work, not a separate function handed off to communications staff or press officers. The operator who produced the finding is the operator who understands its limits, its scope, and the ways it can be misrepresented. A translation produced by someone without that understanding is likely to misrepresent in ways the operator can see but the translator cannot.
In practice, this means the operator drafts or reviews every translation that carries their finding forward. Where professional communications staff are involved, their role is to assist with register and accessibility; the operator retains authority over whether the translation preserves substance. Sign-off authority on a translation rests with the operator, not with the communications function.
This discipline has operational consequences. An operator producing findings that will reach multiple audiences will need to produce — or at least to review — multiple translations. The time budget for a finding therefore extends beyond the analytical work to include the translation work. An operator who treats translation as overhead to be minimised, or as someone else's responsibility, is the operator whose findings are most likely to be misrepresented in the register they actually land in.
The finding is not finished when the operator has produced it in the grammar's register. It is finished when the operator has produced, or reviewed, each version that will enter the registers it is going to reach. The operator's responsibility follows the finding to the reader, not only to the hand-off point.
Closing
The grammar is precise in its own register. Registers beyond the grammar's are not less rigorous — they are differently rigorous, with different categories doing different work. The operator's translation task is to move the finding across that boundary without losing what the grammar was precise about, and without accreting claims the grammar did not support.
An operator who has done this well produces findings that are useful in multiple registers, verifiable by any reader who wants to descend to the original, and honest about what each version does and does not carry. An operator who has done this poorly produces findings that are read with the weight of the grammar's authority but that have lost the grammar's limits in translation, and the readers using those findings will act on claims the instrument did not underwrite.
Guide 8 — Corpus Governance — addresses the custodianship disciplines that maintain the registry's integrity over time, including the handling of findings that have been translated, released, and returned to the registry as part of its own record. The register work in this guide and the governance work in the next guide are continuous: translation discipline is how individual findings move outward; corpus governance is how the registry maintains its coherence as findings accumulate.