Cultural Nuance Matters: Translation Considerations in Tender Is The Flesh

A translator’s job is weighing linguistic trade offs to make a choice. That choice affects style, rhythm, theme, cultural nuances, and even world-building. This essay analyses three of such choices.

Jun 10, 2026

Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.

I couldn’t agree more with Anthony Burgess. A translator’s job is not only a matter of swapping words in a language for those in another. It requires—demands, even—that one chooses words so precisely that rhythm, thematic meaning, and cultural nuance carry through… all while remaining accessible to readers in the target language.

Translating is not an easy task, yet loving language as much as I do1, I wanted to discuss some nuances I noticed when reading Tender Is The Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica. Perhaps this novel hit closer to home because—just as the author of the book—I’m also from Argentina, though I later emigrated to Australia.

Therefore, this essay will examine three translation choices in Sarah Moses’ English version: the handling of honorifics, the inconsistent treatment of proper names, and the cultural weight embedded in some specific words.

Almost every language has honorifics…

…but not every language—and neither every culture nor country—uses them in the same way. Furthermore, their use and meaning across time can also vary.

In Argentina, in particular, there are two ‘sets’ of honorifics:

The equivalent to Mister, Missus, and Miss: Señor, Señora, and Señorita respectively, and
Something that doesn’t quite have a translation into English, but it is culturally loaded: Don and Doña—with the former being the masculine and the latter the feminine versions.

We can see both of these in action in Tender Is The Flesh. Here’s an example of the first one:

Someone is clapping and calling his name. "Hello, Señor Tejo?"

The other honorific can be seen here:

She tells him that his father, whom she calls Don Armando, is doing fine. He tells Nélida he’ll stop by for a visit soon, that he’s already transferred the money for this month. Nélida calls him “dear”, says, “Don’t worry, dear, Don Armando is stable, he has his moments, but he’s stable.”

But here is a key distinction:

Señor carries no such cultural weight, and it functions as formal address, used in the same way an English speaker would use Mr or Sir.
Don, on the contrary, is quite loaded with historical context and meaning. Allow me to elaborate.

Technically, Don is an archaic honorific with roots in Spanish colonial culture.

It always precedes a name, and formality depends on pairing: while Don Armando Tejo (full name) is the most formal usage, Don Armando (pairing only to the first name) implies respect with some familiarity. However, Don Tejo (the honorific preceding only the surname) marks the speaker as uneducated.

Originally, the honorific was reserved, almost exclusively, to the nobility.

But here’s where things get interesting.

Almost every language has homonyms—words that are written and spelled the same, but have different meaning, which must be inferred by context. This is the case with ‘don’, which also means “Gift” or “an aptitude to perform a task” or even “a characteristic granted to someone by a deity”2. This dual meaning eventually shifted the honorific’s use during the colonial era (known as the Virreinato), extending to those who conquered land in the Crown’s name using their own resources—hence titles such as Don Juan de Garay.

Over time, the landowning association faded, but the honorific persisted and mutated in use. For example, the common insult “he’s a nobody” would be translated as “Es un don nadie” using the honorific. At the same time, praise for good manners would be “don de gente”—roughly translated as “gifted with people’s skills” yet appealing to the honorific.

This shift over time also affect how it was used. It became more commonly used by older generations, and far more common with men (e.g., Don Armando) than with women (Doña Cecilia). Likewise, it is often reserved for seniors than for middle-aged people.

Thus, Don carries a landowning history, appears in both insults and praise, and has shifted meaning—and targets—across generations. Like Japanese -san or -dono, it encodes social nuance that Mister or Sir cannot capture—and so has no English equivalent translation.

Yet in the Sarah Moses translation, both honorifics were preserved in Spanish.

The translation preserves both honorifics, likely as an attempt at foreignisation—namely, deliberately maintaining the source text's linguistic and cultural features rather than adapting to the target culture. However, preserving Señor adds cognitive load to the reader without a corresponding cultural payoff.

While I appreciate foreignisation, I believe it’s worthwhile only when there is cultural and/or historical nuance to preserve. In the case of Señor, there is none. So here’s how I’d done it.

This is the original passage in Spanish (yes, Spanish writing uses em-dashes as indicator of dialogue):

Alguien aplaude y grita su nombre.
—Buenas. ¿Señor Tejo?

Sarah Moses translation:

Someone is clapping and calling his name. "Hello, Señor Tejo?"

My take:

Someone claps and shouts his name. "Hello. Mr. Tejo?"

Beyond the honorific change, I’ve also preserved the simple present tense of the original (‘aplaude’ for ‘claps’, and ‘grita’ for ‘shouts’), which creates a more immediate, sharper rhythm than the progressive form.

Yet as we saw, honorifics are accompanied by names, and…

Names often have an underlying meaning. Translating them or not is also a translator’s choice.

Tender is the Flesh is set in Argentina, though the location—city or town—is not specified in the text. As a result, most names are fairly common names one could encounter there: Marcos, Armando, Nélida, Cecilia, Marisa; the only exception are foreigners, such as Urami (a Japanese character) or Urlet (a Romanian ex-patriate).

However, Sarah Moses’ translation renders one character's name in English: Jasmine.

This is a complex translation choice. The character is, in reality, a ‘head’—a human woman bred as livestock—and so begins the story without a name. Therefore, the book primes the reader through the perception of Marcos Tejo, the narrator, who slowly develops a preference for her scent:

He can smell her. She has a strong smell because she’s dirty, but he likes it, thinks of the intoxicating scent of jasmine, wild and sharp, vibrant. His breath quickens.

Eventually, the introduction is quite abrupt:

He inhales her wild, vibrant smell, hugs her. “Hi, Jasmine.” He untied her when he woke up.

…and the reader is left to infer that Marcos named this woman based on her scent: that of a jasmine flower. In Spanish, her original—spelled as Jazmín—is also the name of the flower, which shows that the translator likely focused on making the name’s origin and meaning quite legible for the audience. But this choice breaks the world coherence. Why would an Argentinian character, in Argentina, give someone an English name?

Consider this.

Up to here, the book has shown us something: characters of Argentinian origin have names common in Argentina, while foreign characters retain their foreign names. Therefore, why would Marcos choose an English name for this woman? While a reader can abstract themselves from this nuance, Jasmine is the only English name in the entire story, making the contrast even starker.

I would have solved this by adding two words:

First, I’d kept the three original mentions to the “scent of jasmine” entirely in English. These prime the reader exactly as the original did.
Then, at the moment her name is said for the first time, I’d add a clarification connecting the name to the scent. Like so:

He inhales her wild, vibrant smell, hugs her. “Hi, Jazmín.” His jasmine. He untied her when he woke up.

Here, the reader would’ve needed to connect “her wild, wibrant smell” (which was already introduced) to “His jasmine,” while reading that new sentence after the dialogue as meaning clarification. My this choice would’ve preserved word coherence over immediate transparency, while trusting literary readers to bridge jasmine and Jazmín.

Wild jasmine flowers. They truly have a unique scent.

This brings me to the last example:

Specific words that carry complex meanings, often related to usage and social connotations.

Some languages handle this through synonyms. For example, in English, start and begin are rather colloquial, while commence carries a formal or organisational tone. For example, jobs seldom have “start dates”; they tend to have “commencement dates.”

This is roughly what happens with forbidden and prohibited. Both mean “not allowed”, but forbidden is often used for something that feels more socially punishable or taboo, while prohibited is more commonly used for formal rules, laws, or regulations. That distinction does not exist in Spanish, where both meanings are carried by a single word: “prohibido”.

But just as it was with Jazmín’s name, translating the author’s use of ‘prohibido’ was also quite a complex endeavour. Let me show you the Sarah Moses’ translation of the excerpt in question:

When he’s finished, he brings her to her feet and looks at her. […] He moves towards the smell of jasmine, and without thinking, hugs her. The female doesn’t move or tremble. She just raises her head and looks at him. […] He strokes her neck. Now, he’s the one who trembles. He removes his jeans and stands there, naked. His breath quickens. He continues to hug her as it rains down.
What he wants to do is prohibited. But he does it anyway.

Though the chapter fades to black3, it is easy to guess what Marcos does to Jazmín. However, the book’s world-building adds additional meaning to it. Allow me to explain.

If you recall, Jazmín is not a ‘woman’, but a ‘head’: livestock, and seen as non-human by the other characters. Later in the story, we discover that Marcos, the narrator, originally worked as an inspector during the ‘transition’—the period during which cannibalism was legalised—and so “was one of the people who drafted the regulations and rules.” During that time, he encountered men who kept female ‘heads’ in their houses for… reasons. The book explains:

With that statement, they were able to call the team in charge of examining heads for evidence that they’d been “enjoyed”, which was the official word used in such cases. The regulations specify that reproduction is only permitted by artificial means. […] As such, domestic females should be virgins. […] Having sex with a head, enjoying her, is illegal and the sentence is death in the Municipal Slaughterhouse.

So yes, there is a regulation prohibiting what Marcos was going to do to Jazmín… but there is also a social connotation. Consider this excerpt: young Marcos—still working as inspector—and his colleague discover that a couple had hidden a female ‘head’ under their bed and that the husband was “enjoying her”:

Eventually they looked in the couple’s room. Underneath the bed was a wooden box with small wheels that was big enough to hold a person lying down. When they opened it, they saw the female, in what looked like a coffin, unable to move. […] When the woman walked into the room and saw they’d discovered the female, she broke down. She began to cry and told them that her husband had sex with the head and not with her, that she couldn’t take it any more, she’d been replaced by an animal, and couldn’t bear the idea of sleeping with that disgusting creature under the bed.

The bold styling is mine, hoping to bring your attention to the social perception of the book’s society: ‘heads’ are considered “animals,” not humans. “Disgusting” and “creatures.” What the husband did to this ‘head’ was, in the wife’s eyes, forbidden because it was taboo or socially looked down upon.

Therefore, when the author originally wrote:

El que tiembla ahora es él. Se saca los jeans y se queda desnudo. La respiración se acelera. La sigue abrazando debajo de la lluvia.
Lo que quiere hacer está prohibido. Pero lo hace.

…she was appealing to both meanings: the social implications and the legislation. If you recall, both forbidden and prohibited translate as ‘prohibido’ in Spanish.

So which one to choose? The answer is not straightforward, because the trade offs are complex.

Allow me to explain.

Tender Is The Flesh is, at its core, a thought-experiment on language. It shows how the choice of words—specifically, bureaucratic, clinical ones—can detach someone from the moral impact of their actions; saying Marcos’ job is “to kill humans” has a different ethical weight to “processing heads.” This effect is something I discussed in extent in my podcast:

Language Makes Horror Bearable: The Linguistics Behind Tender is The Flesh

Livia J. Elliot

May 13

Listen now

Therefore, the Sarah Moses’ translation chose prohibited—partly because of grammatical similarity, and partly to appeal to Marcos’ awareness of the legislation. The cost was emotional impact. However, using forbidden would’ve prioritised the emotional impact, making it more legible to the reader, while perhaps violating the central theme of the book.

What matters here is this: this problematic doesn’t exist in the original Spanish. ‘Prohibido’ means both prohibited and forbidden at the same time, so a Spanish reader would’ve simultaneously gathered the legislative prohibition and the taboo.

Why would I have chosen?

I deeply valued the thematic depth of Tender Is The Flesh, but I also valued the moral ambiguity of Marcos Tejo, and how his morals are slowly corrupted by language. Given the point in the story where this scene happen, and the mental state of Marcos at the time, I’d chosen forbidden—simply to reinforce that, at some point, he did have morals… and simply resorted to clinical or legislative language later on, when the consequences of his actions became unbearable.

To close off

Allow me to say this: translation is one job with no clear-cut answers. Ultimately, it is a matter of trade-offs based on world-building, authorial intent, legibility, semantic and cultural meaning, thematic work, rhythm, and style. Different translators, even if aiming for the same target language, would likely produce different results.

But that’s a topic for another essay.

Happy reading,

Livia~