Inferential Patterns in the Translation of Financial Metaphors
107real time contexts, where the speakers’ intentions are verbalized or written
and the listeners have to infer and decode them. In pure communicative
terms, metaphors are normally used to ease the listeners’/readers’
comprehension of certain complex meanings. Similarly, this process is
reduplicated in translation situations, where neither the original authors,
nor the translators, nor the final recipients interact physically. As Neubert
(1997: 7) observes, translators “develop two selves, an SL-receiving
personality and a TL-producing personality” when they translate. They try
to make target readers believe that the original source language writers are
actually communicating with them.
This intentional-inferential framework is manifest in the case of
English financial metaphors, where it serves to facilitate source language
recipients’ comprehension (Mateo 2014; 2015). Very often, as stated
above, these metaphors use ad hoc conceptual schemas that materialize in
singular lexical formats. However, although most of these metaphors can
be easily understood by English-speaking financial specialists and other
groups of less specialized users, they can pose significant inferential
problems to other languages’ recipients not familiarized with these
descriptive solutions. In the specific case of financial neonyms, target
addressees may be unable to interpret such conceptual meanings or their
linguistic form because it is very likely that they have not arrived in the
target language yet. Translators are then confronted with the paradox of
having to translate singular lexical structures (financial metaphors)
originally devised to ease source language readers’ comprehension but
which pose serious inferential and decoding problems for target audiences.
In this case, translators will have to address this apparent contradiction by
taking in consideration two basic assumptions (adapted from Mateo 2014:
411–12):
a) The target language financial metaphor will preferably include the
same or similar cognitive framework and linguistic (lexical) input
as the source language one. This aim may pose some foreseeable
difficulties because it is possible that the target language lacks the
same or similar metaphorical expressions capable of triggering
analogous inferential responses from the readers. Consequently, the
recipients will not be able to access a metaphorical homonym in
their language. However, translators may still use other
compensatory linguistic-semantic strategies that can provide target
language readers with the same or similar inferences.
b) The target language financial metaphor, translated in context, will
seek to generate similar inferences in their readers through the