Abstract
This article examines the semantics and usage of the English spatial preposition and adverb through in Animal Farm and Jonathan Livingston Seagull, as well as its translation into Ladin (Orwell, 1945/2024; Orwell, 1945/2004; Bach & Munson, 1970/1973; Bach & Munson, 1970/2000). The analysis is grounded in Tyler and Evans’s (2003) semantic framework and incorporates additional insights from Talmy’s (2000a; 2000b) typology of manner and path in motion events. The first part of the study uses examples from the British National Corpus (BNC) and the English Web 2021 (enTenTen21) to illustrate the main concepts and categories of through. The core of the analysis illustrates how through functions in both physical and non-physical proto-scenes, with more extended senses occurring in Animal Farm. In some cases, Ladin maintains a sense of direction and passage by using adverbial and prepositional expressions, while in others it reinterprets the through-passages by using more static expressions or conveying a sense of dynamism and manner description through figurative language. This qualitative analysis demonstrates how detailed contrastive analyses of translations can reveal subtle differences in spatial expression and offer insight into broader linguistic conventions and creative choices across languages.