Inferential Patterns in the Translation of Financial Metaphors
119implications of feeling inferior, or – to use an appropriate metaphor – like
a fish out of water. However, there is a financial intention behind this
sentence, as to be long refers to ‘a dealer’s market position when he/she
sells less than he buys’, while to be short means the opposite, i.e. ‘to sell
more than one buys’. Consequently, the stock market context, where this
sentence belongs, should give us the inferential clues necessary for
interpreting both metaphors correctly.
The second example includes two typical financial metaphors, bulls
and bears, referring to ‘(optimistic) buyers’ and ‘(pessimistic) sellers’.
Raiders, which generally apply to ‘bandits who unexpectedly attack
people or places’, may also refer – according to the Merriam-Webster
Dictionary, to ‘a person who tries to take control of a business by buying a
lot of its stock’. Dozer can be both an ‘overbearing person, a bully’ and ‘a
large powerful tractor (with a) large blade in front that flattens areas of
ground’.^11 When applying the adequate inferences, the financial metaphors
bear raiders and bull dozers might be interpreted as ‘opportunistic
speculators’ and ‘arrogant buyers’, translated into Spanish as especuladores
oportunistas and inversores gallitos,^12 respectively.
In the preceding pages, I focused on the different inferential tasks that
translators perform when reading the texts they have to translate, i.e. on
how they try to interpret the original text in the target language in a
relevant way. This complex cognitive task is crucial in the translation
process. We should not forget that decoding the linguistic components of an
utterance/text is only part of the communication process, and depends largely
on the intentional/inferential relation established between the addressors and
the addressees, which is not language-specific. Consequently, if translators
are not able to correlate the textual content with its contextual cognitive-
based information successfully, the inferences they achieve will be
probably wrong. Context plays a fundamental role in utterance/sentence
interpretation. However, context does not seem to be external to the
interpretation process: it is built and adapted to the addresses’ specific
communicative needs (the translators’, in our case) and plays an essential
part in the interpretation progress. Context building is, therefore, limited to
specific language situations, and should convey the cognitive and
informational assumptions that allow translators to apply the appropriate
inferences that will materialize in a suitable linguistic output. In
conclusion – from a cognitive perspective – translators will try to ensure
that their translations comply with the following prerequisites:
(^11) See The Free Dictionary at: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/.
(^12) Spanish Gallito (lit. ‘a cocky guy’) alludes to ‘an arrogant and presumptuous
person’.