Linguistics and Language Practice

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Browsing Linguistics and Language Practice by Author "Du Preez, Erica"

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    Metafoor in die vertaalde mediadiskoers oor aandele en markte in Finweek
    (University of the Free State, 2009-11) Du Preez, Erica; Naudé, J. A.
    English: 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.