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cognitive stimuli capable of increasing their ability to infer and fine-tune
their financial meaning hypotheses. Moreover, metaphors may add
emotional, and even festive, elements that can help readers understand
deep and complex concepts, and which may make an impact on them in a
more effective way than the technical terms themselves. Added to that, it
could be said that metaphors in specialist languages serve a pedagogical
purpose of informing and explaining the obscure sides of science to
beginners. However, it is not anything new, as financial metaphors have
been traditionally used in common speech, in expressions like: pay the
price for success, save words, borrow ideas, bear the cost, etc.
As I have insisted in the previous pages, specialized translation is a
complex task in itself, which requires advanced language skills in both
languages, along with a functional knowledge of the translated field. This
kind of knowledge takes years of experience to acquire. The translation of
figurative language, in our case financial metaphors, poses additional
difficulties. If we manage to go beyond the cognitive level successfully
(i.e. accomplish the correct inferences), the next step will be to take
different translation decisions and opt for applying any of the following
strategies:
- Do not translate source language metaphors, i.e. use them in the
target language as borrowings, or apply periphrases to explain their
meaning:
x Cepsa abre la puerta a ampliar el “free float” tras la salida del Santander
y Fenosa. [lit. Cepsa opens the door to “free float” growth following the
departure of Santander and Fenosa].
x Los “blue chips” alejan al Ibex de la tormenta europea. [lit. “Blue chips”
move the Ibex away from the European storm].With this first strategy, translators will force target language
addressees, especially inexpert ones, to multiply their inferential efforts.
Consequently, readers who are not very good at English may not know
what these borrowed specialist terms mean, as they may interpret the
English terms literally, or they may fail to recognize them as ad hoc
metaphorical structures, which is what actually happens in many internet
pages in Spanish. In the case of the first metaphor, free float, if it is
translated literally as flotación libre,^10 the resulting term will not have
(^10) This translation into Spanish is fairly common in Internet with 16,400 hits even
higher that the accepted one “capital flotante” (12,800 hits), but it is not present in
the Spanish specialized dictionaries mentioned in the reference section.