146 Sylvie De Cock and Diane Goossens
3 000 personnes) in the English to French direction (29.4% of the translations) than
in the French to English direction (19.4%). This tendency to omit the approxima-
tor in translations may be partly due to the translation strategy of ‘simplification’,
defined by Baker (1996: 176) as “the idea that translators subconsciously simplify
the language or message or both.” However, the combination of the results from
both Goossens (2012) and the present study also seems to point towards a ten-
dency to use less explicit approximators around numbers in French.
Another possible explanation for the lower number and proportion of com-
binations of approximators and numbers denoting quantities in the French cor-
pus might be connected with the level of formality in BENews and FRENews.
A study (Goossens and De Cock 2012) which compared the use of combinations
of approximators and numbers denoting quantities in two different business gen-
res in English, namely business news reporting and academic business writing,
revealed a statistically significant lower number and proportion of combinations
of approximators and numbers in the latter than in the former. This difference
was explained by a number of factors that are largely genre-related like differ-
ences in the types of quantities approximated, the communication purpose and
target readership, the sources used by the writers and the level of formality of the
language used. The corpora used in the present study were sampled to represent
the same genre (i.e. business news reporting) and should therefore be fairly similar
in terms of these factors. That said, as pointed out by Chuquet & Paillard (1987:
218), “il faut savoir qu’à registre comparable des différences sensibles de niveau
de langue peuvent subsister entre l’anglais et le français.” In other words, the level
of formality of the language used in the same genre can be seen to differ between
English and French, with French typically characterised as more formal than
English. Although these differences have essentially been discussed in connection
with lexis and word formation, it may not be unreasonable to assume that differ-
ences in formality levels within the same genre may also be reflected in the use
of other linguistic phenomena. Vagueness and imprecision have been associated
with informality and prototypical informal genres like spontaneous conversation
(Biber et al. 1999; Carter & McCarthy 1997, 2006; Crystal & Davy 1975). A large-
scale investigation of recent language change in written English (Leech et al. 2009)
has shed light on what Leech and Smith (2009) refer to as the tendency towards
colloquialisation of written English. A similar tendency has to our knowledge not
been reported for French. In short, a possible lower degree of formality in BENews
compared with FRENews may well account for the greater number and proportion
of quantity approximation in the English corpus. An additional observation which
appears to be in line with a difference in formality between BENews and FRENews
concerns direct speech reporting in the corpora. Like news reporting in general,