How to approach translation in a financial news corpus?

Abstract

This article deals with some of the theoretical and methodological problems that arise when working with a bilingual comparable (i.e., non-parallel) journalistic corpus of financial news that is relatively large (9 million words). The corpus under study comprises two sets of texts drawn from Canadian French and English newspapers in the years between the Tech Wreck of 2001 and the financial crisis of 2007−2008. Following Davier (2015) who advocates for a broadened definition of news translation that includes intralingual activity, the authors make a case for the study of intralingual translation, or rewording, which is a fundamental feature of financial news, as journalists work to popularize specialized knowledge for lay audiences. The methodological challenges of surveying interlingual translation in a sizeable corpus of financial news are discussed in relation with the production of news in Canada. A pilot study using the lexical item “subprime” and its French equivalents illustrates how interlingual and intralingual translation can be investigated in a corpus comprising 18,601 news items. The authors explain how they apply a mixed-method approach (Saldanha and O’Brien 2013) that is based on the interaction between qualitative and quantitative analysis in their research on news translation.