Chapter Five
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important company’. This apparently innocuous substitution of gordo for
grande will trigger completely different inferences in the target readers, as
they will be forced to construct an alternative interpretive context. It is
only in the presence of a new adjective that new contextual assumptions
will originate, leading to a different configuration of the information
conveyed by the original utterance. Sharks are no longer ‘fish’ but
‘companies executing hostile takeovers’, and big fish turns out to be ‘an
important and desired company’.
Concluding remarks
In the preceding sections, I have addressed the importance of applying
accurate inferential procedures prior to the translation of metaphors in
general, and financial ones in particular. These procedures are normally
conditioned by the presumed meaning expectations readers elicit from the
utterances they hear or the texts they read, and from their interpretation.
For Wilson and Sperber (2004), interpretation is a cognitive process
defined in terms of a structured representation of the content that satisfies
the expectations of relevance raised by the utterance itself. It is a cognitive
mechanism based on the way we process the information we hear or read.
It seems clear that in order to achieve a correct interpretation of
specialized metaphorical structures, translators must comply with different
conditions. First, a good command of the source language specialist
(financial) discourse patterns, which include their linguistic structure,
semantic meanings and pragmatic use. Secondly, a sufficient knowledge
of the scientific or professional field addressed, which may allow the
translators access the correct ad hoc inferences, and, finally, the ability to
transfer this cognitive and structural information to the equivalent target
language linguistic, semantic and pragmatic arrangements (i.e. financial
metaphors). If these three conditions are met, target language users will be
able to activate similar inferential responses that will allow them to access
meaning interpretations equivalent to those originally assumed by the
source language recipients.
References
Alcaraz, E.; Hughes, B. & J. Mateo. 2012. Diccionario de términos
económicos, financieros y comerciales/ A Dictionary of Economic,
Financial and Commercial Terms. Inglés-Español / Spanish-English,
6th edition. Barcelona: Ariel.
Bielenia-Grajewska, M. 2009. “The role of metaphors in the language