Chapter Five
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of abstractions that have the surface appearance of discussion and the
exchange of ideas, but which in fact serve only in order to maintain the
illusion of communication and creative dialogue”. This business and
financial nu-language is related to what is commonly labeled as “New
Economy” or those new high-growth sectors related to technological
breakthroughs that practically drive the world economic growth today.
There is a term-creating tide around this New Economy approach. New
terms and metaphors are continually coined; words and expressions, such
as client-centric, deliverable, de-risk, managerial, incentivize, evergreening,
featurize, early-birding, or compounds and truncations like mancession
(man + recession), budgetunity (budget + opportunity), dotconomy (dot +
economy), immerce (internet + commerce) or or trep (a truncation of
entrepreneur) translate with difficulty into other languages. However,
other languages, for example Spanish, also participate in the game by
coining similar buzz terms, some original and some calqued from English
(comerciabilidad, bancarización, customizar, esponsorizar or marketizar,
to mention just a few).
The study of metaphor in business discourse in general and financial
metaphor in particular has been approached extensively by different
authors – Palmer (1996); Cortés de los Ríos (2001); Russo (2002); Vaghi
& Venuti (2003); Charteris-Black (2004); Koller (2004); White (2004);
Skorczynska and Deignan (2006); Bielenia-Grajewska (2009); Holmgreen
(2009); Rojo López and Orts Llopis (2010) or Wang (2013), among many
others – and from different perspectives (business press and media;
business advertising; market movement metaphors; business English
teaching; English business loans to other languages, etc.). However, works
on economic and financial metaphor translation from a cognitive
perspective have been scarce so far (Nicaise 2011; Schäffner 2012; Sjorup
2013 or Panou 2014). From among different definitions of metaphor, I will
take one that considers them as ad hoc communicative concepts that
broaden their encoded lexical meaning (Wilson 2010). Metaphors, besides
being linguistic resources, are one of the cognitive processes that reflect
the human mental potential to create series of inferences in order to
explain the underlying intentionality in the messages we hear or read. With
their use, parallel contexts are recreated where alternative cognitive
representations replace the real or perceptible subjects (the financial terms)
and serve their addressors to explain them. According to the Relevance
Theory, in metaphors, constituent words are the evidence of the speakers’
meanings in a communicative situation where concepts diverge from their
lexical meanings. These concepts may be more general or more specific
than lexical meanings. These cognitive scenarios allow communication in