Stage 4: Rendition

From Latin reddere (“to give back, to return, to render”), through Old French rendre and Middle English rendren. Etymologically, rendition denotes restitution: that which is returned or given back in transformed state. The musician renders notation into acoustic performance; the translator renders source language into target idiom; the lexicographer renders empirical linguistic data into definitional prose. Each act of rendition transforms material substrate into interpretive expression while preserving—or attempting to preserve—essential semantic content and structural relations.

“The task of the translator consists in finding that intended effect upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original.” — Walter Benjamin, The Task of the Translator (1923)

Within the GNORIUM editorial lifecycle, Rendition constitutes the pivotal transition from analytical decomposition to synthetic composition. The Crystallization phase commences at this juncture: analytical findings accumulated through prior stages are systematically rendered into structured lexicographic entries via definitional drafting, sense ordering, and the methodical affiliation of attestations to their corresponding entries. Dispersed empirical evidence thereby achieves coherent scholarly form—observational data translated into the formal register and organizational conventions of lexicographic discourse.

Process

• Resolution: Determining whether analyzed lexical forms constitute novel lemmas requiring independent entries or variant manifestations of extant headwords.
• Drafting: Composing definitions according to the genus–differentia model inherited from Aristotelian categorical logic: stipulating first the superordinate class, then enumerating distinguishing features that differentiate the definiendum from coordinate members of that class.
• Ordering: Arranging polysemous sense structures—either diachronically by historical emergence or synchronically by frequency and semantic centrality—to optimize both scholarly comprehension and practical reference consultation.
• Affiliation: Establishing formal linkages between illustrative attestations and their corresponding sense definitions, thereby grounding each definitional claim in empirically attested usage.

The Art of Synthesis

Within the traditional lexicographic scriptorium, editors manually sorted citation slips into physical aggregations representing distinct senses and grammatical forms—a labor-intensive classificatory process that could require months of sustained effort for a single high-frequency headword. Rendition performs this synthetic operation computationally: aggregating analytical findings across distributed attestations, correlating usage patterns temporally and across textual registers, and composing definitions that balance technical precision with interpretive accessibility. The fundamental craft of lexicographic synthesis remains methodologically continuous with historical practice; computational infrastructure merely extends operational capacity and temporal efficiency.