Authors of financial media discourse use metaphors to communicate with readers.
Finweek is a renowned South African financial magazine and its articles on stocks
and markets are written by expert authors in the field of the South African stock
market. Finweek is published in Afrikaans and English and contains the same
articles, but the Afrikaans and English metaphors differ. The study of metaphor in
translated financial discourse on stocks and markets is a fundamental characteristic
of financial texts and in a multi-lingual country such as South Africa it may support
the expansion of the lexicon in the financial domain.
The hypotheses were put that the translated media discourse in Finweek on stocks
and markets contains coherent metaphor clusters that centre around the metaphors
WAR AND POWER, and SPORT AND GAMES; that metaphor has an ideational function in the
South African discourse on stocks and markets, i.e. it extends the lexicon; that the
choice of metaphor coheres with certain objectives of the translator/author in the
financial text in a specific cultural background, and that metaphor has an ideological
effect.
The study built on the results of research by Bowker and Pearson (2002) on the use
of language for special purposes in corpora; the research of McEnery, et al. (2006)
on corpus based linguistics; the research of Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Lakoff and
Turner (1989), Lakoff (1997), Lakoff and Johnson (1999) and Kövecses (2002) on
the source and target domains of metaphors; and the research by Koller (2004) on
metaphor and gender in business media discourse.
The research was conducted within the framework of corpus based translation. An
Afrikaans and an English electronic corpus were compiled from
1 000 articles on stocks and markets that appeared in 33 editions of Finweek from
March 2006 to October 2006. The two corpora were compiled as parallel corpora
and the programme ParaConc was used for the analyses. The focus was on
metaphor in LSP (Language for Special Purposes).
The study showed that financial discourse on stocks and markets in the Afrikaans
and English versions of Finweek are characterised by coherent metaphor clusters of
WAR AND POWER and SPORT AND GAMES. The use of these specific conceptual
metaphors reflects the goal that the author/translator has in the cultural background
of the readers, because the metaphors in the Afrikaans and English texts differ. Evidence was found that, to transfer a specific message, the authors used a specific
choice of metaphor. In reports on the performance of companies and the stock
market, Finweek uses conceptual metaphors to transfer their perceptions. Inherent in
these metaphoric terms are conceptual, communicative and ideological principles.
The discourse shows a basic reference and notion of an evolutionary struggle for
survival. On the level of conceptual metaphor struggle is conceptualised in terms of
physical conflict as it occurs in the domains of both WAR and SPORT.
The analysis indicated that, from a quantitative viewpoint, the WAR AND POWER
metaphor appeared most frequently in the Afrikaans text and that the SPORT AND
GAMES metaphor appeared the second most frequently. In the English text the SPORT
AND GAMES metaphor appeared most frequently and the WAR AND POWER metaphor the
second most frequently.
A possible explanation for this finding is that the modern society in South African is
confronted with violence, power play, fear, vulnerability and struggle. When an
author wants to convey the notion of a struggle for evolutionary survival in Afrikaans,
metaphors from the WAR AND POWER domain are used abundantly. On the other hand,
sport is an international common concept and by using metaphors from the SPORT
AND GAMES domain in English, the author can transfer to international readers the
notion of struggle for evolutionary survival.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:ufs/oai:etd.uovs.ac.za:etd-12152010-143210 |
| Date | 15 December 2010 |
| Creators | du Preez, Erica |
| Contributors | Prof JA Naudé |
| Publisher | University of the Free State |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | en-uk |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.uovs.ac.za//theses/available/etd-12152010-143210/restricted/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University Free State or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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