Translation in financial Spanish: a corpus-based study on the use of metaphor

Álvarez García, C. (2019) Translation in Financial Spanish: A Corpus - Based Study on the Use of Metaphor. Current Trends in Translation Teaching and Learning E, 6. 331 – 356. 331 TRANSLATION IN FINANCIAL SPANISH: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY ON THE USE OF METAPHOR Carmen Álvarez García Universidad de Sevilla Abstract This paper presents a study aimed to analyse variation in one of the characteristics commonly attributed to economic and financial language, the frequent use of metaphor as an expressive resource, in order to help the translation into Spanish of economic texts and its training. To this end, a corpus of texts has been compiled pertaining to economic and, more specifically, financial language. The sources have been the European Central Bank, Spanish press, whether specialised in economics or generalist, and websites of different financial institutions. The texts included in the studied corpus deal with the same subject matter, more specifically the regulation of banking transfers between countries in the Eurozone, ruled by the Single Euro Payments Area legislation, and can be classified into different textual genres. The findings show significant variation in the use of metaphor in the texts studied depending on the type of discourse within which the text is framed, which has implications for the teaching of translation and for the profession itself. Key words: translator training, metaphor, economic language, financial language, corpus-based study Álvarez García, C. (2019) Translation in Financial Spanish: A Corpus - Based Study on the Use of Metaphor. Current Trends in Translation Teaching and Learning E, 6. 331 – 356. 332 1. INTRODUCTION In recent years, an increasing number of studies have examined the use of metaphor in the language of economics, especially with regard to national and international crisis situations affecting various countries in the so-called Western world. These studies have one common component: they deal with journalistic texts that reflect the tendency towards the frequent use of metaphor as a useful expressive resource when it comes to explaining highly abstract situations and, to a certain extent, to determining the interpretation of reality in one direction or another. This paper emerged from the starting hypothesis that financial language varies in terms of the different expressive resources utilised when institutional discourse gives way to journalistic discourse. If this were found to be true, the aim would then be to ascertain the possible causes for this variation. In order to respond to this question, this study focuses on the use of metaphor; hence, a corpus of parallel monolingual Spanishlanguage texts was compiled, composed of a series of reports issued by the European Central Bank, a group of articles published in the Spanish press, and a collection of articles published by banks. In order to avoid a possible bias in the use of metaphors derived from extraordinary situations, such as the economic crises or bubbles that have affected society in recent years, this paper examines an issue that, in theory, should have fewer connotations Álvarez García, C. (2019) Translation in Financial Spanish: A Corpus - Based Study on the Use of Metaphor. Current Trends in Translation Teaching and Learning E, 6. 331 – 356. 333 regarding the measures adopted by governments in order to tackle such situations, which have seriously affected citizens, and which could determine the intentional use of certain expressive resources over others. For this reason, reports were chosen that corresponded to the first two stages of the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) legislation, which, as discussed in greater detail below, regulates banking transfers between countries in the Eurozone. The results of the analysis conducted here offer relevant data about significant differences detected in the use of metaphor, as well as the possible underlying motive that might explain the number and type of metaphors utilised. 1.1. Critical Discourse Analysis The critical study of discourse, which emerged as a strand of critical linguistics, is grounded in the understanding of language as an instrument (Habermas 1982) and distinguishes between discourses on the basis of the linguistic expressions used and social manifestations. Hence, discourses can be classified as advertising, propaganda, journalistic, institutional, etc., according to the influence of society and culture (Kress 1989). Leeuwen (1993) analysed discourses, considering them social instruments that construct reality, whereas Fairclough (1985, 1989 & 1993) began with the idea that discourse is capable of Álvarez García, C. (2019) Translation in Financial Spanish: A Corpus - Based Study on the Use of Metaphor. Current Trends in Translation Teaching and Learning E, 6. 331 – 356. 334 dominating society and can be used to achieve political or commercial ends. In this respect, Habermas (1982, p. 259) indicated that language is also a medium of domination and social force. It serves to legitimize relations of organized power. Insofar as the legitimizations of power relations are not articulated, language is also ideological. Although there are other models integrated into discourse analysis, the approaches mentioned above are of particular interest in this study, since they introduce an aspect that might be relevant in the use of metaphor as an expressive resource, especially in the economic field, that might contribute to the difficulty of translation, being then necessary to include them in financial or economic translation training. Regarding metaphors, its importance in everyday discourse is undeniable and is indeed highlighted in the various studies conducted from different perspectives on rhetoric since the mid- 20th Century. The model developed by Lakoff and Johnson, ([1980] (2007), one of the most famous in relation to studies about political language and, more specifically, journalistic language, establishes that metaphors are phenomena of cognition and intersubjective comprehension, and it is useful to identify simple metaphors in discourses. Its main contribution lies in its attribution of a fundamental role to metaphor in discourse, with a function that goes beyond linguistics and focuses on cognition since, as this model sets out, metaphors “occupy a central role in our ordinary system of thought and Álvarez García, C. (2019) Translation in Financial Spanish: A Corpus - Based Study on the Use of Metaphor. Current Trends in Translation Teaching and Learning E, 6. 331 – 356. 335 language” (Nubiola 2000, p. 76). As pointed out by Lakoff (1993, p. 244), metaphors are “the main mechanism through which we comprehend abstract concepts and perform abstract reasoning;” hence they are resources employed in discourses deliberately or subconsciously with a view to transmitting abstract and specific concepts that, otherwise, might be difficult to understand. In this respect, there are new study proposals that highlight the importance of metaphor not only in the comprehension of said abstract concepts, but also in the subsequent reasoning required in decision-making based on complex concepts (Morris et al. 2007, Thibodeau & Boroditsky 2011, Williams 2013, Williams et al. 2011). Tying these postulates in with the research conducted by Leeuwen (1993) and Fairclough (1985, 1989 & 1993) raises the question of whether metaphor can be used in certain discourses to dominate society and create a certain reality and if so, how it can be translated into a foreign language. 1.2. Metaphor in the economic and financial sphere Right from the outset, economics has demonstrated the need to use metaphor in order to convey concepts, owing fundamentally to their high degree of abstraction. Hence, in classic works on Álvarez García, C. (2019) Translation in Financial Spanish: A Corpus - Based Study on the Use of Metaphor. Current Trends in Translation Teaching and Learning E, 6. 331 – 356. 336 economics, there are numerous metaphors, some of which have been incorporated into regular language usage, which makes ascertaining their origin even more complex. However, metaphor was not a subject that particularly interested researchers until the late 20th Century, when Henderson (1982) and McCloskey (1985) highlighted the importance of metaphor in economic thinking, an idea that was subsequently developed by Dudley-Evans and Henderson (1990), Henderson et al. (1993) and Klamer et al. (1988). McCloskey states that the economist “makes an intellectual world by choosing or failing to choose a metaphor of speech in the economy. The economic actors themselves make their worlds with metaphors” (McCloskey, 1995, p. 232). Thus, the author bestows a key function on metaphor in economic thought, which ties in with the ideas of manipulation expressed by Leeuwen (1993) and Fairclough (1985, 1989 & 1993). 1.3. Discourse analysis and metaphor in translators training Munday (2016, p. 142) states that while text analysis concentrates on the organization of texts, discourse analysis focuses on “the way language communicates meaning and social and power relations,” being thus crucial for translating, as translators must activate extra linguistic, cultural and social knowledge in order to transmit the original meaning. Álvarez García, C. (2019) Translation in Financial Spanish: A Corpus - Based Study on the Use of Metaphor. Current Trends in Translation Teaching and Learning E, 6. 331 – 356. 337 Bringing discourse analysis to translators training may offer the students the possibility to practice their linguistic skills in written discourse and improve their results. To this extent, the findings of the study carried out by Erton (2014) show that discourse analysis training for translation students helped them to “critically analyse language functions for translation purposes” (2014, p. 123), especially when dealing with the translation of texts on economics. As said, metaphors appear to play a key role in business, economic and financial languages. And as Stienstra (1993, p. 215, quoted in Shuttleworth 2017, p. 52) states, “many, if not most, interesting metaphors form networks which are both systematic and dynamic,” leading to the idea that they must be taken into consideration while targeting the translation of an economic text. The present study is thus based on this approaches and tries to analyse the patterns of metaphors in different types of texts treating the same financial issue in order to reach conclusions on the influence and frequency of appearance of metaphors in financial texts. 2. METHODOLOGY The analysis conducted here is based on a reference corpus that encompasses two groups of texts framed within financial language: institutional texts from the European Central Bank Álvarez García, C. (2019) Translation in Financial Spanish: A Corpus - Based Study on the Use of Metaphor. Current Trends in Translation Teaching and Learning E, 6. 331 – 356. 338 (ECB) written in Spanish and journalistic texts published in the Spanish press. The corpus comprised 5 ECB reports, with a total of 85,011 words, and 64 press articles, with a total of 76,663 words. The main subject chosen was a relevant economic-financial issue throughout Europe, disseminated by an international organisation. On the basis of these premises, reports issued by the ECB about Single European Payments Area (SEPA) legislation were chosen. SEPA legislation regulates movements of money between bank accounts in different European Union countries. In other words, it seeks to equate transfers made within each of the countries that make up the European Union with those carried out between different EU countries. The first reports drafted about SEPA legislation came out in 2004, when the first stage to design this legislation got underway. From 2006 onwards, with the implementation stage, this legislation began to receive press coverage. From then on, the European institution began to draft a series of annual progress reports up to the last one in October of 2010, with the last press article examined here dating from May of 2011. Following the implementation stage, two migration stages occurred, and the full process is not yet complete. However, the implementation stage generated an important quantity of journalistic documents; hence this study focuses on this stage. In order to use the two subcorpora efficiently, the group of institutional texts has been grouped under the name of CorBeS. Álvarez García, C. (2019) Translation in Financial Spanish: A Corpus - Based Study on the Use of Metaphor. Current Trends in Translation Teaching and Learning E, 6. 331 – 356. 339 On the basis of the aforementioned reports, we began the search for journalistic articles reporting on this legislation, without initially drawing any distinction with regard to specialisation, although subsequently the articles were classified by the source from which they were taken, distinguishing two main groups: 1) A first group of articles (30 in total) taken exclusively from economic-financial press sources, which gives us an idea that the issuer of the text is an expert in economics or finance, as is the recipient, the target readership for this type of publication; and 2) A second group of articles taken from any other type of publication (19 in total), outside of the economics section of the general press; webpages by specialists in Law or other areas; or general webpages dedicated to informing consumers about any issues that affect them. These publications are aimed at readers who are not experts in economics, and it is not known whether the issuer is an expert, which is why they are differentiated from the previous group. A third group of articles disseminating this legislation (15 articles in total) was also compiled, corresponding to the information included by banks (the majority of which were affected by this legislation) on their webpages to keep their customers informed. This third group of documents was dealt with separately from the previous groups on account of their hybrid nature, since they were publications with a clear informative purpose, drafted by experts in finance but aimed at the general public. This third group of informative texts was grouped under the Álvarez García, C. (2019) Translation in Financial Spanish: A Corpus - Based Study on the Use of Metaphor. Current Trends in Translation Teaching and Learning E, 6. 331 – 356. 346 Table 3 shows that the highest number of metaphors used in the corpus of ECB reports are related to construction and to human beings and life, which leads us to think that this European institution is seeking to convey an image of creation of the European Union, of taking a step further in the life of the union, and prolonging it over time with solid foundations. However, these texts do not make great use of warring metaphors, which are so frequently found in the language of economics, as indicated by Gilarranz (2010: 415), perhaps with the intention of eliminating the idea of combat that they transmit, placing greater emphasis on ideas that generate the creation of a shared project. To analyse the CorPreS corpus, each of the component subcorpora has been analysed and presented separately. Table 4 provides a summary of the metaphors found in the texts published by the specialist financial and economic press (CorPreSE): Table 4. Classification of metaphors in CorPreSE Álvarez García, C. (2019) Translation in Financial Spanish: A Corpus - Based Study on the Use of Metaphor. Current Trends in Translation Teaching and Learning E, 6. 331 – 356. 347 Álvarez García, C. (2019) Translation in Financial Spanish: A Corpus - Based Study on the Use of Metaphor. Current Trends in Translation Teaching and Learning E, 6. 331 – 356. 348 As we can see, the CorPreSE corpus includes many more metaphors of all kinds, particularly groups of metaphors pertaining to objects, life, and human beings, an aspect that coincides with the CorBeS corpus, although it differs from the latter not only in terms of the considerable increase in their frequency, but also in terms of the much greater variety of warring metaphors used, in line in this case with the usual frequency of this type of metaphor in economic and financial language. Table 5. Classification of metaphors in CorPreSNE Álvarez García, C. (2019) Translation in Financial Spanish: A Corpus - Based Study on the Use of Metaphor. Current Trends in Translation Teaching and Learning E, 6. 331 – 356. 349 In relation to the corpus of articles taken from publications that do not specialise in economics and finance (CorPreSNE), table 5 shows that in this case, in which the texts analysed are articles from publications that do not specialise in economic or financial information, a drastic decrease is observed in the variety of entries registered in all categories. The most frequent forms of metaphor found pertain to construction, and life and human beings, which shows that the three subcorpora follow the same metaphorical patterns in terms of constructing a common space. In this case, however, warring metaphors decrease considerably, since we found just one, which moves this corpus closer to that of institutional texts. In the last group of texts, emanating from banks (CorPreSBa), we found very few metaphors: Table 6. Classification of metaphors in CorPreSBa Álvarez García, C. (2019) Translation in Financial Spanish: A Corpus - Based Study on the Use of Metaphor. Current Trends in Translation Teaching and Learning E, 6. 331 – 356. 350 In this case, we also find greater variety in the section on construction, following the general lines observed in all the subcorpora studied. In light of the data presented in the tables above, illustration 1 presents a summary of the number of metaphors per subcorpora, which clearly shows the differences in terms of the variety of terms and metaphoric expressions found in each subcorpus: Figure 1: Number of metaphors in each group of subcorpora 4. CONCLUSIONS In light of the data given here, we can see different patterns in the use of metaphors in financial language by the issuers of texts Álvarez García, C. (2019) Translation in Financial Spanish: A Corpus - Based Study on the Use of Metaphor. Current Trends in Translation Teaching and Learning E, 6. 331 – 356. 351 encompassed in each of the subcorpora studied and which have been differentiated taking as a reference the type of discourse contained in each text, closely related with the specialisation of the issuer and the recipient. A much greater use of metaphors is observed on the part of experts in economics and finance who have written texts reporting on SEPA legislation in specialist economic-financial publications, aimed at an expert or semi-expert readership, which in principle reinforces the idea that economic and financial language are characterised by the frequent use of metaphor. However, when analysing the economic-financial texts published in non-specialist publications, we see a reduction in the variety and frequency of metaphors in the case of texts that contain institutional discourse, drafted by the ECB, and drastically in the case of texts corresponding to information issued by banks, which barely use any metaphors to disseminate and explain the new concepts related with SEPA legislation. Both subcorpora include texts written by specialists. However, whereas the CorBeS corpus contains discourses aimed at experts and semi-experts, the CorPreSBa corpus is aimed at the general public. For this reason, it would appear that the expertise of the issuer or the recipient does not significantly influence the use of metaphors. Furthermore, there are very similar patterns of metaphor usage between the corpus of ECB reports and those of informative Álvarez García, C. (2019) Translation in Financial Spanish: A Corpus - Based Study on the Use of Metaphor. Current Trends in Translation Teaching and Learning E, 6. 331 – 356. 352 publications that do not specialise in economics and finance, both in terms of frequency and typology. Equally, with the exception of CorPreSE, corresponding to specialist informative publications, the other groups fundamentally use metaphors related to construction, human beings and life, probably owing to the specific subject area to which the texts refer, which leads us to think that perhaps this typology would undergo changes if we were to analyse a different type of subject matter. Returning to the idea set out at the beginning, regarding the theory of discourse and language as creators of reality, we can see a trend among all the issuers of texts included in the four subcorpora studied towards the construction of a positive image and generator of growth for the new legislation standardising banking operations, together with the idea of a united and common Europe. This is crucial in economic and financial translation training as it leads to the idea that the translation brief is essential while taking decisions on translation techniques to apply, especially related to the use of metaphors that, as seen, are used not only as a way to explain abstract concepts but only to create a reality, and that it use depends on the type of text, the specialisation of the text and the recipient of the translation. To this extent, discourse analysis appears to be a useful tool in translation training to allow students to reach conclusions on the use of language resources on the source text and on how to transfer them to the target text. This analysis of metaphors used in four groups of texts framed Álvarez García, C. (2019) Translation in Financial Spanish: A Corpus - Based Study on the Use of Metaphor. 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