Translation in financial Spanish: a corpus-based study on the use of metaphor

Abstract

This paper presents a study aimed to analyse variation in one of the characteristics commonly attributed to economic and financial language, the frequent use of metaphor as an expressive resource, in order to help the translation into Spanish of economic texts and its training. To this end, a corpus of texts has been compiled pertaining to economic and, more specifically, financial language. The sources have been the European Central Bank, Spanish press, whether specialised in economics or generalist, and websites of different financial institutions. The texts included in the studied corpus deal with the same subject matter, more specifically the regulation of banking transfers between countries in the Eurozone, ruled by the Single Euro Payments Area legislation, and can be classified into different textual genres. The findings show significant variation in the use of metaphor in the texts studied depending on the type of discourse within which the text is framed, which has implications for the teaching of translation and for the profession itself.