A protocol written for a machine, read by humans Why each of the six ARGUS glossaries was written from its own language’s protocol alone, and what comparing them taught us about the protocols themselves.
ARGUS exists in six languages: French, English, German, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. An AI needs only one of these versions. The ARGUS Skill bundles the French version alone and can produce the analysis in another language. More generally, the language of the protocol supplied to the AI, the language of the analysed text and the language of the analysis are independent of one another.
The other five versions are therefore there for readers. According to the user guide, their purpose is “to make the method itself readable, understandable, and auditable by as many people as possible”. This note follows that choice through: what it demands of the six versions, why ARGUS acquired an explanatory glossary for each language in September 2026, and how those glossaries were built so that their agreement would mean something. It describes the explanatory glossaries in version 1.0.0, the first to carry a number shared by all six languages.
The reader needs the protocol before the analysis and after it
The reader of an ARGUS analysis turns to the protocol at two moments. Before, to know what will be applied: Design Note 01 explains why criteria published and dated before the analysis matter when it comes to auditing it. After, to check what was done. The report’s headings, its qualifications and the checks it declares all refer to notions in the protocol, which the reader looks up in the version they read.
On this site, the reference analysis of a case study is produced in the language of the analysed text, and some are then translated. The analysis of Dario Amodei’s essay, written in English, can also be read in French and in German. Its German reader checks it against the German protocol, whichever version the AI was given.
Any version can therefore be the one the AI applies, and each is the one some reader reads. The six must say the same thing. The wording is where they are likely to drift apart: a protocol of about a thousand lines, rendered in six languages, leaves each of them choices of vocabulary that only show up when the versions are set side by side.
A term can drift from one language to another
Three cases found in the V5.1.0 protocols show what drifting means.
One notion, two words. In 0.a, the protocol provides for two cases in which the mandatory stop does not occur. French calls this a dispense and keeps the word throughout, down to the short version and the appendix on corpora. English, German, Spanish and Italian do the same with exemption, Befreiung, exención and esenzione. The Portuguese protocol heads the rule Isenção, then speaks of “regime de dispensa” in the short version and of “fórmulas de dispensa” in the corpus appendix. A Portuguese reader who comes across the second form has to guess that it means the first.
One word, several notions. The German protocol uses Ausnahme for three things: the “declared derogation” of 0.a, when the user asks for the analysis of a text of weak relevance anyway; the three exclusions in the modal constancy check, in Step 6; and the exception that Rule 13 constitutes in the short version. Each of the other five versions uses at least two words for these three notions.
The heading in front of the reader. The AI fills in a model report, the output template, supplied with each version of the protocol, and it is the template that provides the report’s headings. For test 3.I, the Spanish, Italian and Portuguese templates write circularidad informacional, circolarità informazionale and circularidade informacional; their protocols say informativa. A reader who looks the heading up in their own language’s protocol or glossary will not find it. The check of the Portuguese template found 21 of 28 headings worded differently from the protocol at the corresponding point; the check of the Italian template found 24 discrepancies.
An AI links dispensa to isenção without effort. For a reader who is checking, each of these discrepancies is a place where the check can go astray.
A discrepancy can also be a good choice. For the straw man of Step 1, the Portuguese protocol uses espantalho, the scarecrow. In French, homme de paille traditionally denotes a front man, the only sense Le Robert records for the phrase, and the French glossary has to warn the reader. The Portuguese glossary only had to set aside the scarecrow in the fields and one figurative sense. The divergence was kept, and the glossary work judged it to be in the Portuguese version’s favour.
Each glossary is written from its own language’s protocol alone
An explanatory glossary tells the reader what a term means in ARGUS, in their own language. It would have been possible to write one and translate it five times. The six glossaries were built differently: the part of each notice that describes the ARGUS usage is drawn from that language’s protocol alone, without reading the notices of the other glossaries, and no notice points out a convergence or a divergence with another language.
The reason is the one the protocol gives for the cross-audit, the second of the three levels of contradiction it provides for: a second AI analyses the same text blind, without the first analysis, because “a second AI shown the first produces a revision, not an audit”. A glossary written with another one in view would be a translation of it, and its agreement with its model would prove nothing. Written separately, six glossaries that describe a notion in the same way attest that the six protocols state it in the same way. Where they diverge, the divergence points to a place to examine.
The separation has a second effect: each glossary responds to the difficulties of its own language. The German glossary specifies, in its notice on modal constancy, that the three Ausnahmen of Step 6 are to be confused neither with the derogation of 0.a nor with the exception of Rule 13. The Portuguese glossary brings isenção and dispensa together in a single entry. The other languages need none of these warnings.
The lists of entries differ too: 109 in French, 108 in English, 115 in Spanish, 94 in Italian, 134 in German, 135 in Portuguese. Each number is an outcome, with no target set in advance. Italian groups several terms under a single entry. German, one of the last to be written, started from a survey of 205 notions in its protocol; Portuguese made its own survey, then aligned its list with the German one.
The rule tightened along the way. The first notices, from 10 to 12 September, were written in all six languages side by side, entry by entry. The ban on reading the other glossaries’ notices came afterwards, with one exception, a glossary in a distant language used as a layout model: practised for Spanish, formulated for Italian on 20 September, written into the procedure on the 23rd. Even then, during the work on German, three frozen glossaries in other languages were opened by mistake, and their text entered the working conversation.
Behind the scenes, a cross-language glossary aligns the languages by their anchors
Separate glossaries need a meeting point; without one, nothing would indicate that dispense and isenção designate the same notion. That meeting point is a cross-language glossary, which is not published. It has two sides. The first is a table of forms: for each ARGUS concept it covers, the form used by each of the six protocols. It also serves translations, which must render every ARGUS term by the form used in the protocol of the target language. The second is an inventory of 205 notions, each tied to the section of the protocol where it appears and to the titles of the entries that deal with it in each glossary.
The cross-language glossary aligns the languages by protocol section and by entry title. It contains no definitions and never compares the content of notices. It supports three checks. Does every notion treated in one language have its counterpart in the others? Are the protocol’s closed sets, such as a scale or a grid of questions, covered in full? Is every formula that the protocol prescribes word for word tied to an entry?
What it flags is then verified in the protocols. On 23 September, the first four frozen glossaries were compared through their anchors alone. Five independent measures produced the same split: French and English on one side, Spanish and Italian on the other. The split followed the order of the work: the automatic checks, developed while the Spanish and Italian glossaries were being written, had not been applied to the first two. French and English were revised. In the six glossaries of version 1.0.0, every “See also” cross-reference leads to an existing entry.
The Ausnahme case shows where the tool stops. The inventory of 205 notions was drawn from the survey of the German protocol, the most recent at the time it was compiled. It tied the three exclusions of Step 6 to section 0.a, because the word Ausnahme appears there for the derogation. The Portuguese check noted that the Portuguese protocol did not mention them in 0.a; the German protocol does not either. The discrepancy came from the German word. The cross-language glossary flags, and the protocol of each language decides.
It makes no language the reference. Its concept identifiers are technical, and the table of forms, written in French, states that it grants normative priority to none of the six languages. It has errors of its own: its revision 1.2.0, numbered separately from the explanatory glossaries, still gives, in all six languages, the name “weak pole” to an element of the modal constancy check that the six protocols call the “retracted pole”. Its correction is pending.
The glossaries also serve to reread the protocols
Writing a notice means reading every occurrence of a term in its protocol. That work, carried out six times, brought discrepancies in the protocols themselves to light. The Italian protocol calls a descriptor Modalità retorica, a feminine noun, while its template calls it Modo retorico, a masculine one, and the values of each agree with its gender. The Portuguese exemption and the template headings are cases of the same kind.
A published version of ARGUS is never modified. These discrepancies are recorded for the next version, and the Italian correction is already prepared in a working version, V5.1.1.
A discrepancy that has been flagged is not always upheld. The German qualifier for rhetorical mode, raffiniert, where the other languages say “sophisticated”, was first presented as a defect of the German protocol. On examination it was reclassified as a choice of term, which remains to be decided.
What the method leaves open
The six glossaries were written, in separate conversations, by AI models from a single family: the documents are separate, the writer is shared. Assigning each language to a different writer would have brought the method closer to the cross-audit it imitates, but it would have meant coordinating six writers at the same time, which was beyond the project’s reach. In return, each glossary was audited by another AI, and each finding of that audit was checked against the protocol or the cited source before being accepted.
How familiar a word actually is to a reader of each language has not been measured; it was assessed from dictionaries and from the way words are formed. The cross-language glossary bears the mark of the language from which its inventory was drawn, and its errors only come to light by going back to the protocols. The discrepancies found in the V5.1.0 protocols have not yet been corrected: the reader of that version encounters them, and their glossary flags some of them.
The result can still be improved: a frozen glossary can be reopened, in a new version, for a documented defect or an inventory decision. The six versions of ARGUS remain six texts; this arrangement shows where they differ and tells the reader of each one, in their own language.
This note was written in French. Each of its translations was made separately, with the glossary of its language for ARGUS terms.