Inferential Patterns in the Translation of Financial Metaphors
105notoriously taken by the top officials, there is a fundamental “human” side
that has to be accounted for. Although metaphorical language is
consubstantial with financial discourse, both in its abstract and applied
areas, it is in its social stratum that these metaphorical uses are widespread.
As can be read in the Investopedia’s web page,^5 as regards the social
component of finance, its purpose aims at studying “the more ‘human’
side of a science considered by most to be highly mathematical. This
illustrates that the study of finance can, at times, be more art than science”.
Many of these new financial terms had to be introduced and explained
- to those English speaking receivers whose knowledge of financial
intricacies was not too high – by means of metaphorical expressions which
referred to most specialized technical content. Therefore, the language of
finance has been enriched with new and creative linguistic solutions
(metaphors) that aimed at easing some of its more complex conceptual
ideas and strategies. As large layers of society were not able to understand
what was going on, although they participated in the game, metaphors
helped them understand the concepts which remained abstruse in nature.
However, in translation, where two cultural and linguistic systems
meet, metaphors can sometimes be more of an obstacle, rather than an aid
for comprehension. Nicaise (2011: 408) gives the example of using sports
metaphors in financial environments. She reports the case of American
football metaphors used in certain political discussion forums by the
former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as an example of how
metaphors – instead of building bridges between languages – widened the
communication gap when certain participants were not familiar with that
particular sports terminology. It is then important for translators not only
to adapt the linguistic content found in the source language financial
metaphors to the target language formal requirements, but also to fine-tune
their cognitive intentional-inferential details to make them culturally
relevant.
Undoubtedly, business discourse in general is a highly creative variety
of the language of economics, with neonyms being coined practically
every day.^6 Some authors (Power 2009) have even labeled business
language as a sort of Nu-language, which – according to Temmerman’s
somehow extreme position (2001: 49) – is characterized as a kind of “a
language without referent and with a ‘junk syntax’, a non-grammatical set
(^5) See: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/finance.asp#ixzz3yiSyOYOp.
(^6) See, for example, the financial dictionary at investopedia.com, which offers more
than 13,000 financial terms. It is updated almost daily with the addition of new
terms and uses that indicate the vibrant terminological activity financial language
shows these days.