The lexicon is undoubtedly a prominent level of analysis in the search for patterns typical of translated language, or features of translation (term borrowed from Olohan 2004: 92). The focus has been placed mostly on measures of frequency and distribution of lexical items to test for hypotheses such as (lexical) simplification (Blum-Kulka and Levenston 1983; Laviosa 1998; Corpas Pastor 2008) and lexical normalization (Kenny 2001; Hansen-Schirra 2003). Despite the reality of translation as manipulation of meaning, studies using data from lexical meaning are less abundant. Within the realm of compositional lexical meaning, an under-explored area of interest to inform on features of translation is the opposition abstract vs. concrete.[1]

This paper aims to contribute to the existing knowledge about changes in abstractness in translated texts; specifically it proposes and tests a hypothesis for the Spanish into English language direction, namely that abstractness is reduced because fewer abstract words are used in the English versions. Abstractness, defined below, is operationalized as the occurrence of a class of abstract nouns, those denoting properties of entities, for example “elegance” in “the elegance of a tall hedge,” as in Example 1 below. Properties are types of meanings that are used for evaluation, specifically in the expression of the speaker’s attitude in the domains of ethics, aesthetics and emotion (see, for instance, Martin and White 2005: 40).

The chosen genre is fictional prose (Biber and Conrad 2009: 19), in particular two novels by Spanish writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (1939-2003), Los mares del sur[2]/Southern Seas[3] and Tatuaje[4]/Tattoo.[5] In fiction, evaluation contributes to delineating narrative point of view: “To tell a story from a character’s point of view means to present the events as they are perceived, felt, interpreted and evaluated by her at a particular moment” (Niederhoff 2011/2013: 5). Consider Example 1, a description of a mansion’s gardens where nouns and adjectives are used to evaluate the landscaping.[6]

The narrator is describing the gardens from the point of view of the character that is paying a visit, middle-aged detective Carvalho. The observer’s attention, which the reader may construe from lexical choice and syntactic articulation, is focused on the formality of the landscaping. The English translation is literal (Delisle, Lee-Jahnke, et al. 1999: 154), except for the replacement of a relative clause with an independent sentence. In the second sentence, the recurrent analytical grammatical pattern of a head noun with a prepositional phrase complement (“the elegance of a tall hedge”) is preserved.

The description proceeds with the driver in a subtle ironic tone. This is reproduced in Example 2, with property-denoting nouns in bold.

In the Spanish version, qualities of objects are presented through the abstract nouns contención [restraint] and (mucho) mundo [worldly wisdom]. In the second sentence, which translates literally as “he appreciated the stylish restraint of his grey suit,” the property contención becomes grammatically foregrounded as the head of the noun phrase while the physical object of which the restraint is predicated surfaces in the complement. Hence, the character is reported to appreciate the restraint in the uniform, rather than the uniform.

In the English version of Example 2, information is packaged differently. Both abstract nouns are deleted; the verb appreciate has concrete objects as arguments (uniform and hands) and the entire sentence foregrounds the sensory aspects (fine, whitish-grey, velvet, leather, etc.). The adverb elegantly fails to express the cognitive assessment contained in “worldly wisdom,” a quality that presumably only a seasoned detective could project on the chauffeur just from the look of his hands. Such an insight would help the reader construe the scene from Carvalho’s point of view.

As Examples 1 and 2 illustrate, the author exploits the structural possibilities and stylistic preferences of Spanish to create a link between property attribution, evaluation and point of view. Instances of abstract nouns for property attribution abound throughout the novel; this can be interpreted as a motivated choice with literary relevance (Halliday 1971: 339). However, as the translation of Example 2 suggests, their frequency in English may decrease. As with any potential property of the translated text, the causes must be sought in a combination of factors. Steiner (2001: 5) proposed “typological factors, register, and properties of the translation process, understanding in particular.”

As regards typological factors, we can first draw on the insights about the expressive preferences of languages which were applied by work in the comparative stylistics discipline. In Vinay and Darbelnet (1995: 51), “abstract words often refer to generic concepts and tend towards the characteristics of mathematical symbols and consequently appeal to the intellect rather than the senses. Concrete words refer to physical objects or actions.” English is claimed to have a preference for concrete expression, that is, “a level at which the linguistic realisation mirrors concrete reality,” while French prefers abstract expression, a level which “shows reality in a more general light” (Vinay and Darbelnet 1995: 51). Vázquez Ayora (1977: 82-84) offers numerous examples of shifts from concrete in English to abstract in Spanish, in support of the resemblance of Spanish to French.

Case studies of translations support this view. Munday (2008: 129-120) reports a preference for “concrete translations” and a “concrete language” in the case of Cien años de soledad[7] by Nobel Prize Laureate García Márquez and its English translation[8] by Gregory Rabassa. Gesner (2004) observes semantic shifts from the abstract and general to the concrete and particular in French-to-English literary translation, although the opposite kinds of shifts are also observed, even if to a much lesser extent.

The alleged preference for concrete modes of expression in English seems to be reinforced by the linguistic styles prevalent in present-day fiction regarding the use of a specific grammatical category, namely nouns. Francis and Kučera (1982: 546) and Biber, Johansson, et al. (1999: 65) observed a tendency to use fewer nouns than verbs, at least in their fiction subcorpora, compared to non-fiction. Furthermore, the patterns of noun phrase postmodification have been evolving since the 18th century both in fiction and non-fiction; relative clauses and of-prepositional phrases have decreased in use, with a “steadily decreasing use” of the latter in fiction (Biber and Conrad 2009: 169). Thus, the rendering “the stylish grey uniform” matches the evolution of style preferences for fiction in English, which integrate the expectancy norms under which translators work (Chesterman 1997/2016: 62).[9] However, part of the meaning is lost.

The status of translation in the English literary canon works against the preservation of the abstract nouns in Example 2. Generally, translated literature in English is subject to a norm of fluency (Venuti 1995), regardless of a particular work’s position as high literature or popular fiction. The translation excerpted in Example 2 appeared in a crime fiction series from a small British imprint (Serpent’s Tail), although the source text had been published in a general fiction collection.[10] Translations of crime novels often show a lack of awareness of the genre-specific challenges, which include “formal and rhetoric peculiarities” that contribute to reader involvement (Hopkinson and Seago 2018: 227), namely the lexicon of emotion, traces of language varieties, and certain narrative modes like free indirect speech (see, for instance, Cadera and Pavić Pintarić 2014). Carter (2014) found fewer metaphorical expressions in English translations of French detective fiction compared to their source texts.

The third factor, the process of translation, “has to be seen in the context of and in interaction with the other two” (Steiner 2001: 5). Hansen-Schirra (2003: 297), comparing fiction portions of the Translational English Corpus[11] with the British National Corpus,[12] found that typical fiction features (such as time and place adverbs, perfect and past tense forms) are overused in translations, rendering translated fiction “more narrative and situation-dependent.” Interestingly, the study also found an overuse of untypical fiction features (nominalizations among them), suggesting that translations “point towards a more neutral register.” The role of genre has been observed in other studies of patterns of nouns and noun phrases in translational English. Alves, Pagano, et al. (2010: 116) report the percentages of category shifts in various combinations (verb-noun, noun-verb, adjective-noun, noun-adjective, etc.) comparing the directions English-German with German-English. Shifts from any category to noun occur in lower percentages in translated English than in translated German in register-controlled corpora of corporate communication. These figures suggest that “English translations are less nominal than their German originals” (Alves, Pagano, et al. 2010: 116). Lewandowski (2015), in a study on translations from Polish into English, found a decrease in noun phrase constituents together with a “concentration” strategy, which the author links to a general tendency observed by Delisle, Lee-Jahnke, et al. (1999: 127) in English translations from many languages. On the topic of abstract words, Obeidat (1998), in a small case-study of Arabic-English translation of literary texts, found that the percentage of abstract nouns went from 31% of all nouns in the Arabic original to 24% in the English translation.

These observations justify further research with the general aim of confirming reduced abstractness in English translations of Spanish fiction. They also stress the need for a definition of abstractness that teases out the semantic dimension (concrete vs. abstract) from the grammatical (its association with the use of nouns), in order to ascertain the factors leading to such a reduction and their potential link to different translation tendencies.

The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 is devoted to preliminary definitions. Section 3 presents the methodology of the study, namely data selection and classification of translation procedures to take abstractness into account. Section 4 provides a quantitative description of the translation correspondences in both works followed by a qualitative analysis. Section 5 provides a general discussion of the results, the potential effects of the shifts in abstractness for the narrative value of the novels and suggestions for further work.

The data for the present study is a set of Spanish-English concordances obtained through the following process. First, a search for items ending in -idad (singular) in the digital versions of the Spanish novels was conducted. Los mares del Sur contains 167 instances and Tatuaje contains 80 instances. After manual textual analysis of each instance, only those denoting properties of entities were selected (46 in Los mares del Sur, and 39 in Tatuaje).[16] Their English correspondences were identified, analysed in their broader co-text and classified according to the kinds of textual correspondences given to abstractness on both levels, conceptual and grammatical.

For conceptual abstractness, three categories are distinguished, namely those renderings that preserve the same degree of abstractness (including word-for-word translation and semantic shifts), those that reduce abstractness (including semantic shifts, insertion of support concrete nouns, and deletion of the segment), and those that increase abstractness, theoretically possible but not detected in the present study. This typology is presented and examplified in Table 1.

As regards grammatical abstractness, a distinction is drawn between equally abstract textual solutions and less abstract ones, by comparison with the source text. I use the terms parallel, divergent and zero (Ø) correspondences, the latter two following Johansson (2007: 23-26). Hence, a correspondence is parallel when the property is rendered by an abstract noun; it is divergent when a class-shift (noun into adjective, adverb or verb) or a unit-shift (for example, noun into clause) – terms from Catford (1965: 80) – occurs. In a parallel correspondence, deletion of other items in the immediate co-text of the noun is not considered a reduction in grammatical abstractness. Table 2 summarises the typology of correspondences and provides examples.

In a divergent correspondence, information is redistributed, often affecting the whole clause and even higher-ranking units. In the example provided in Table 2, the noun phrase headed by locuacidad (from the adjective locuaz, that is, being someone who talks in excess) is expanded into a clause with the verb talk as its predicate. The referential content – though not the speaker’s attitude – of the superlative premodifier nula is encoded by the modal of disposition want to and by clausal negation. While Spanish condenses the traveler’s subjective experiences (imposed silence and fatigue) and the resulting evaluation of the journey in one sentence, the English version uses three finite clauses and a factual sequential structure to narrate the travelers’ behavior.

The semantic function of the phrase can facilitate a divergent solution. For example, when the property noun is part of the manner adjunct <con [with] + noun>, a manner adverb might be a more direct encoding, even if a parallel template is available in English (such as con habilidad translated as skilfully instead of with skill).

This section offers a description of the translation correspondences according to the typologies presented in the previous section (Tables 1 and 2). A quantitative description is provided first to assess the reduction in abstractness. A qualitative analysis of the typologies follows, with some remarks about the potential impact of shifts on narrative point of view.

The quantitative raw data show that both English translations resort to more concrete modes of expression than their source texts. Southern Seas does so to a lesser extent, as conceptual abstractness is reduced in 15.2% of correspondences, and grammatical abstractness is reduced in 32.6% of instances. Tattoo reduces conceptual abstractness in 17.9% of instances and grammatical abstractness in 46.2%. Despite individual differences these percentages lend support to the hypothesis of reduced abstraction in two works of translated crime fiction from Spanish into English. At the same time, the study does not find evidence for the semantic shifts from the abstract to the concrete claimed to be typical of translation into English by earlier case studies.

As can be seen in Tables 3 and 4, the types of textual correspondences vary.[19] The novel Southern Seas follows the source text’s grammatical patterns more closely, but resorts to deletion more often than Tattoo. This is somewhat contradictory, as the conservation of the source text’s abstract nouns at a microtextual level (that is, transference) is compensated by reducing text, normalizing the content of the novel in a way that is compatible with a given conception of the genre’s conventions. In turn, Tattoo resorts more often to divergent renderings with explicit participants and has fewer instances of zero translation. This could be attributed to both a stronger pull from the usage patterns of English fiction at the microtextual level (namely, standardization) and a tendency toward explicitation for the crime-novel reader.[20] From the perspective of style, transfer contributes to the consistent rendering of the source text’s textual patterns of evaluation, for example the combination capacidad de (capacity for) that construes the anticipation of a feeling or a judgement as the capacity to feel or to judge, as illustrated by the Spanish original in Example 8. There are 5 instances in Los mares del sur, 4 of which are translated literally, and one rendered through the French borrowing joie de vivre, of parallel conceptual abstractness. In Tatuaje, 4 instances were found. Two are rendered literally, one is rendered as the more conventional collocation “spirit (of sacrifice),” of equal abstractness, but different denotation, and finally Example 7 renders capacity as the actual occurrence of a feeling.

The group of property-denoting -idad nouns is heterogeneous. Properties range from “dispositional categories” associated with behavior (like locuacidad, talking in excess) to intrinsic states (like sensibilidad, the capacity to react emotionally). Divergent correspondences in general contribute to greater explicitness because as each property is unreified, its relationship with its argument is expressed through more “direct” phrase and clause structures (for example, behavior through verbs, and states through adjectives) and any implicit entities that make plausible arguments for those properties can be inserted.

The choice of property-denoting -idad nouns has proved very adequate to help establish a baseline for abstractness on different linguistic levels in Spanish-English translated fiction, even with a restricted set of data as the present one. More generally, it has contributed to a better understanding of the interaction between simplification and explicitation that had been established in the work on deverbal nominalizations/grammatical metaphor. The most dramatic rewriting takes place where reified properties cooccur with recursive complement structures and also where the semantic roles diverge from the concrete depiction of reality, as in Examples 4, 5, 6, 7 and 10.

Neither translation reflects the source text’s combination of abstractness and semantic incongruence, as both neutralize personification and metonymy, in line with the findings in Øverås (1998). The present study therefore supports earlier observations on the dilution of style in crime fiction translations. Two potential consequences for the reception of Vázquez Montalbán’s technique in particular may be anticipated. On the one hand, a reduction in abstractness enhances the “page-turner” quality of the book and its commercial advantage. On the other hand, since descriptive passages are retardation devices in the crime genre (Bayó Belenguer 2001: 91), translations adhere less to genre conventions. Perhaps a narrative advantage is gained with attention to physical detail, namely the representation of the narrator as objective and reliable rather than a figure that focalizes events through the mental activity of a character. As Venuti (1995: 287) states, “[i]f the illusion of transparency is strong enough, it may well produce a truth-effect, wherein the authorial voice becomes authoritative, heard as speaking what is true, right, obvious.” However, access to the detective’s state of mind and subjective representation of reality contributes to the richness of experience for the reader, a value that should not be lightly dismissed.