What it is
Abstraction change moves the wording up or down the scale between the abstract and the concrete. The source may name a category, a state or a quality where the target names a tangible circumstance, or the source may name an observable detail where the target names the condition it stands for. The proposition is the same in both directions; what changes is how far the wording sits from the material particulars.
Vinay and Darbelnet identified the abstract for concrete exchange as a modulation subtype, and connected it to their broader claim that French and English do not sit at the same default distance from the concrete. Chesterman keeps it as an independent semantic strategy, his S5, and states it neutrally as a move in either direction rather than as a property of one language pair.
The distinction from generalization and particularization is the point on which this category is most often collapsed, and it is worth stating plainly. Those two techniques move within a hyponymy hierarchy: the target item names a genus of the source item or a species of it, and the two stand in a taxonomic relation. Abstraction change requires no such relation. Bars are not a genus or a species of imprisonment, and an impediment is not a taxonomic superordinate of an inability to attend. The scale here is one of concreteness, not of classification, which is why an item can move along it without any semantic field being involved.
When it applies
- The source language habitually nominalizes a state that the target language states as a circumstance, or the reverse.
- Administrative and legal registers in the source use a cover term for a situation the target reader expects to see described.
- The source uses a concrete detail conventionally, as a settled way of referring to a condition, and the target has no comparable convention.
Examples
FR>EN
- Source: en cas d'empêchement
- Target: if you are unable to attend
- Comment: The French names the abstract category of impediment, which is standard in convocations and formal correspondence. English has no equivalent cover term at that level, and "in the event of an impediment" reads as a translation of something. The move down the scale is obligatory here, not optional.
DE>EN
- Source: Er sitzt hinter Gittern.
- Target: He is in prison.
- Comment: The German picks out a physical detail and uses it conventionally for the condition. The English names the condition. This also shows the boundary against generalization: bars are not a kind of prison and prison is not a kind of bars, so no taxonomic step has been taken, only a step along concreteness.
NL>EN
- Source: De zaak is onder de rechter.
- Target: The matter is before the courts.
- Comment: Dutch names a person, English an institution. The Dutch phrase is the settled way of saying that proceedings are pending, and "under the judge" would be read literally and wrongly. The English is more abstract and, in this register, more precise about what is being claimed.
Watch out for
Abstraction change is where unmotivated improvement most easily hides, because neither direction looks like an intervention. Moving upward discards recoverable detail and leaves nothing in the target to show that detail existed. Moving downward supplies particulars, and particulars that the source did not authorize are an addition of content whatever the word class involved.
- Where the source uses an abstract term with defined force, the abstraction is the operative wording. Statutory cover terms, contractual definitions and classification headings are chosen precisely because they are not tied to a single concrete case.
- A change of word class alone is transposition. This technique is worth invoking only where the level of concreteness genuinely moves, not where a noun has merely become a verb.
- The test is what each reader can see. If the target reader now sees particulars the source reader did not, or has lost particulars the source reader had, the change needs a reason on the record.
References
- Vinay, J.-P. & Darbelnet, J. (1958). Stylistique comparée du français et de l'anglais: méthode de traduction. Paris: Didier. English translation by J. C. Sager & M.-J. Hamel (1995), Comparative Stylistics of French and English: A Methodology for Translation, Benjamins Translation Library 11. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 30–39.
- Chesterman, A. (1997). Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Revised edition 2016, Ch. 4.