78 Campbell et al., column L.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Baseline English Translated BCV
Article usage as %
40
represent a second–tier target of opportunity for follow–up qualitative research.
However, these LIWC results on their own already suggest a possible course of action for financial translators, namely to consider occasionally dropping an optional article, which should have the effect of bringing their translations, on average, closer to the linguistic conventions employed, intentionally or not, by the English–language writers of this sort of corporate communication text.
Verbs
Pennebaker’s catch–all category for verbs is composed of frequently–employed verbs in various forms, but the nature of this category means that it must needs fail to be truly comprehensive. As a result, it seems rather inevitable that we find a somewhat low correspondence between his selection of verbs and those observed in our corpora. Where Pennebaker finds that verbs from his selection make up fully 13.93% of word use in English overall, we see that in our both our sets of shareholder letter texts the incidence of these verbs accounts for a far smaller proportion of the total word production. Our English–language corpus exhibits a usage rate for these verbs of 8.49%, a third lower than Pennebaker’s baseline. The difference is even more marked in the translated corpus, with a usage rate of only 6.39%, representing usage less than half as frequent as in the baseline.
The letters translated at BCV show an even lower rate of usage for the verbs selected by Pennebaker, coming in at 5.59%. There are two reasonable explanations for this observed disparity: either Pennebaker’s verbs are not actually those being used in the particular section of financial annual reports focused upon in this research study, or else verbs themselves are being used more parsimoniously in the specific texts of which our corpora are comprised than in the language as a whole.
It is to be hoped that an examination of the LIWC results for the subcategories of verbs as defined by Pennebaker will shed further light on this particular linguistic phenomenon.
Once again, we find that JP Morgan Chase is the outlier among our specific corpus–
component banks. With verb usage making up 10.18% of the production in JP Morgan Chase shareholder letters, these texts would seem far more closely aligned to the baselines calculated by Pennebaker than those produced at the other banks and financial companies in our selection. On the flip side, the two institutions employing the lowest frequency of verb usage are both French banks, Crédit Mutuel and Banque Populaire Caisse d’Epargne, with 3.44% and 3.74% incidence respectively.
41
As we begin to grow accustomed to certain individual companies in the role of linguistic outlier over multiple categories, the possibility of in–depth analysis of style and linguistic breakdown in texts from these banks specifically begins to seem more likely to produce results of interest to the professional financial translator. While this particular category does not necessarily immediately suggest specific translation strategies, if JP Morgan Chase proves time and again to most closely conform to norms in the deep linguistic structures of its English, it may well prove to represent an invaluable resource for translators interested in producing work for clients that is as effective a vector for communication as is linguistically possible.
Auxiliary verbs
Pennebaker’s category of auxiliary verbs would appear the most likely candidate to disambiguate the two possibilities put forward above, as auxiliary verb usage would not seem likely to vary enormously based on the specific theme of a text given that it is composed of forms of the verbs be, can, do, have, and become, as well as modal verbs, none of which are thematically specific. The baseline for this subcategory as normed by Pennebaker is 8.49%. LIWC analysis of our English corpus shows that auxiliary verb use accounts for 6.03% of all production, an LSM of .83. The French–original corpus comes in at 4.62% of the total, giving an LSM of .87 compared to the English–original letters. As for verbs overall, the texts from BCV show relatively low usage rates for auxiliary verbs, 3.66% of total production, scoring an LSM of only .75 compared to the letters drafted in English.
42 Graph 9: Usage rates for auxiliary verbs
Clearly, auxiliary verb usage in our various corpora show divergence both against the baseline and the other corpora. These numbers also suggest, although not in a crushingly obvious fashion, that language use in our corpus texts features a slightly higher incidence, proportionally, of auxiliary verb use compared to overall verb use. This seems to support the idea that the components of Pennebaker’s verb category are simply less well aligned with financial texts than the more universal verbs making up the auxiliary verb subcategory. However, the relatively modest variances in these categories mean that making sweeping statements about the ramifications of verb use in shareholder letters would be, at the least, fraught.
Perhaps not surprisingly, JP Morgan Chase once again represents the institution whose language use, in terms of auxiliary verbs this time, is the closest to the baseline average, at 7.39%. Crédit Mutuel also crops up yet again as the French–language institution with the lowest similarity to baseline verb–use frequency in English, as auxiliary verbs make up only 1.99% of the language content in the Crédit Mutuel shareholder letters. This of course does not mean in and of itself that the quality of the translation at Crédit Mutuel is necessarily lower than that at other French–language banks whose translations feature higher proportional incidence of auxiliary verbs (for example, Rothschild, at 6.49%), but it can at least be construed to suggest that the translation team at Crédit Mutuel may well have produced a text in English which is more likely to somehow come across as strange,
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Baseline English Translated BCV