We use Lambek's pregroups and the framework of compositional distributional models of language ("DisCoCat") to study translations from Japanese to English as pairs of functors. Adding decorations to pregroups we show how to handle word order changes between languages.

We enrich pregroups with a mapping which allows us to locally apply precyclic permutations to designated substrings. We prove a normalisation theorem for such algebraic structures and briefly formalise some known applications of pregroups to the analysis of clitic pronouns in certain natural languages.

"Spider" is a nickname of special Frobenius algebras, a fundamental structure from mathematics, physics, and computer science. Pregroups are a fundamental structure from linguistics. Pregroups and spiders have been used together in natural language processing: one for syntax, the other for semantics. It turns out that pregroups themselves can be characterized as pointed spiders in the category of preordered relations, where they naturally arise from grammars. The other way around, preordered spider algebras in general can be characterized as unions of pregroups. This extends the characterization of relational spider algebras as disjoint unions of groups. The compositional framework that emerged with the results suggests new ways to understand and apply the basis structures in machine learning and data analysis.