Recent translation alignment algorithms based on multilingual sentence embeddings have achieved near-ideal accuracy on literary texts, enabling reliable detection of omissions and insertions. Yet from a translation studies perspective, omissions and insertions are only the most visible layer of divergence: beneath them lie the rewritings, compressions, register shifts, and pragmatic adaptations that transform a text while nominally preserving its content. This paper asks whether the same embeddings that power alignment can be repurposed as descriptive instruments for translation strategy.

We present a computational framework for characterizing literary translation beyond the binary of presence and absence, applied to a parallel corpus of ten translations of Alessandro Manzoni's "I Promessi Sposi" (1840) spanning eight languages, six language families, and 177 years (1845–2022), aligned at sentence level via TEI encoding. Two complementary metrics — LaBSE cosine similarity and expansion ratio — reveal that semantic fidelity and textual completeness are independent axes of translation strategy, producing a typology of ten distinct translator profiles ranging from faithful adaptor to free literary adaptor.

Cross-translation analysis reveals two patterns consistent across all ten translations regardless of language family or period, suggesting they reflect properties of Manzoni's source text rather than individual translator choice: the plague chapters (31–32) are universally the most divergent, and dialogue fidelity is consistently higher than narrator voice fidelity. Drift block analysis — combining low cosine similarity with compression ratio to detect consecutive runs of heavily compressed pairs — recovers systematic editorial programs invisible to aggregate metrics: Schröder's German translation (1879) conceals ten passage-level deletions targeting authorial digressions, interior monologues, and lyrical passages, while the anonymous Spanish translation (1858) concentrates its cuts in Gertrude's psychology and the plague historiography. Both translators independently reached the same passages by different editorial routes.