Translation studies can be a point of entry for studying how finance is represented in the news. When translation is considered both as intralingual and interlingual operations, it can shed light on the ways journalists paraphrase the complexities of finance for their audiences and how they do so differently in English and in French.
Professor Pier-Pascale Boulanger of Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, works with a Canadian press corpus of 10 million words spanning 2001-2008, a period which starts from the technological bubble and ends with the subprime crisis. Boulanger researches ideology in the financial news by analyzing journalists’ sourcing, citation and (non-)translation habits in the bilingual context of Canada.
The results are interesting. For instance, when the subprime crisis started to unfold in August and September 2007, journalists used metaphors that evoked a nuclear meltdown, a storm and an epidemic. Such frames reinforce the neoliberal view that market crises are unforeseeable and natural events in the face of which regulatory measures are pointless.
Pier-Pascale Boulanger teaches financial, legal, economic and literary translation at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). She has coauthored several papers on the financial discourse in the Canadian press and chairs the Observatory of Financial Discourse in Translation.
For more information: scolina@email.arizona.edu.
