Inferential Patterns in the Translation of Financial Metaphors
121[1.1] Mi consejo es que las crisis ofrecen oportunidades, como
cazador/buscador de gangas que soy, me encanta rebuscar cuando el
mercado va mal.The second financial example, however, does not offer clear contextual
information, which, initially, can mislead the readers:
[2] I know what sharks are like, if they got the chance to eat a big fish, they
will probably go for it.If this statement is contextualized in a financial text, we can focus our
inferences on this field – but if this is an isolated utterance, then we may
have problems trying to interpret its metaphorical overtones and,
consequently, to draw the appropriate meanings. If we are not specialists
in financial translation either, a logical thing would be to translate this in a
straightforward way:
[2.1] Conozco a los tiburones, si pueden comerse un pez grande,
[seguramente] lo harán.In the first translation, the prerequisites (a), (b) and (c) formulated
above are not met, so the compliance with (d) is irrelevant, generating a
cognitive dissonance. Target language readers cannot map the financial
analogy between the source language terms shark and big fish with their
Spanish equivalents, i.e. tiburones and pez grande. Especially misleading
is the adjective grande, which just means ‘big in terms of size’ in Spanish.
Consequently, the inferences created to translate big fish, literally, as pez
grande lead target readers to misinterpret the original author’s intentions
and to contextualize their translation in the zoological domain – unless we
translate the utterance as:
[2.2] Conozco a los tiburones, si pueden acabar con un pez gordo [lit.: fat
fish], seguramente lo harán.What inferences will the readers assume here? In what context will
they place this sentence? In my translation, the change of the adjective,
from pez grande to pez gordo, implies entering a totally different
communicative context, so that we can find ourselves in the financial
world. The simple choice of another adjective, practically a synonym, will
now activate radically different inferences: shark (Sp. tiburón) mutates
from ‘a kind of fish’ to ‘a speculator, an unscrupulous stock market
player’, and big fish (Sp. pez grande) to pez gordo, i.e. a bigwig or ‘an