74 Brennan 181.
75 Pennebaker 41.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6
Baseline English Translated BCV
First person plural usage as %
34
medieval period, a convention which Reiss and Vermeer classify as “a pluralis modestiae”.76) So then, what does this observation of markedly heavy rates of first–
person plural pronouns in fact communicate to us regarding shareholder letters in financial–sector annual reporting, and even more specifically efforts by financial translators to render into English such texts from the Francophone institutions in our corpus?
First and foremost, and despite whatever one might think about the ramifications of higher–than–baseline “we” usage, it must be observed that financial translators working on behalf of the banks in our corpus seem not to have gone far enough in replicating this abundance of first–person plural forms. If we can accept that this high usage rate is deemed by professional corporate communication specialists to serve the purposes of financial institutions, then we must conclude that the financial translators at work here have potentially lessened the communicative impact of the letters translated into English by failing to equip them with as great a preponderance of “we” forms—in fact, they seem to have used these words in a proportion barely half that of the communications drafted in English. It is frequently observed that translators smooth out their source texts as part of the translation process, and in many cases this tendency is met with accolades.
However, as would likely be the case in literary translation, where the medium is at least as important as the message, in these letters to shareholders on behalf of banks and similar institutions in which these people and entities have chosen to invest, it is arguably the case that one of the intended messages of the letters, namely a strong identification between the voice of the financial institution and the institution itself, has been weakened or perhaps even lost. Furthermore, in some uses of “we” words, the intended reader will also be included as part of the antecedent for those pronouns, and will thus receive a strong message, expressed at the fundamental level of Pennebaker’s “function” words, that they are also an integral part of the institution whose yearly triumphs are being trumpeted—and whose stumbles are being placed into context, explained, and provided with remedies.
The high incidence of first–person plural pronouns, then, can be said to serve the communication needs of the institution, and can be shown to, at minimum, serve more than the god complexes of powerful financial industrialists. Conversely, failing to
76 Reiss and Vermeer 165.
35
replicate this deep linguistic strategy could well have a deleterious effect on the overall quality of the communication by the institutions under examination, or at least on the coherence of these communicative efforts with the source texts. “We” words represent one of the major findings in Wells’ research, and a qualitative analysis of this language feature so clearly highlighted by the LIWC results and the quantitative analysis they represent is the most pressing target for a follow–up via in–depth, qualitative research using traditional concordancing tools.
Indeed, the LIWC results from BCV texts–starting just as Wells was completing her research–show the concrete effect of the application of the on–going research into this question at BCV, with an incidence of 5.39% for first–person plural pronouns, higher than even the average for English–language texts and far more pronounced than in the translated texts as a whole. This in turn generates an LSM of .97, representing nearly perfect stylistic synchrony between the shareholder letters translated at BCV and those actually written in the English language originally.
Second person
“You” words in English encompass both singular and plural forms, as well as the informal and formal forms extant in French, in such a manner as to render the separate analysis of the four notional sub–categories possible only on a contextual, case–by–case basis. For that reason, this quantitative analysis considers all second–person pronouns as a single grouping of words. While Pennebaker has established a baseline usage of 1.18% for the words in this category, we find significantly lower rates of usage in our corpus texts. Our English corpus presents a rate of 0.18% for “you” words, already only 15% as high a rate as the average, for an LSM of only .27. In the French–to–English corpus, we find only 0.05% prevalence of “you” words, less than one–third the rate in the English corpus, and only a fractional 4% of the average incidence, equating to an LSM of .08. The letters from BCV align much more closely to the translated texts than the English–original ones, at 0.07%, marking this as a possible target for tweaking to bring closer alignment to the practices observed in English–drafted shareholder letters, although the very small real incidence would render any such efforts inherently fraught.
36 Graph 7: Usage rates for second person pronouns
Here, then, is a category of personal pronouns which is significantly under–represented in our corpora compared to English–language usage in general. However, once again it seems useful to bear in mind the genre at hand: shareholder letters are notionally messages from senior executives and administrators to the owners of shares of stock in their establishment, but these messages are generally written in such a way as to be read by the general public, fund managers, and also various stakeholders. Therefore, the “you”
to whom these letters are addressed is a broadly conceived entity indeed, and is thus not necessarily called out to as directly as would be the case in a more informal letter between friends. It is, however, worthy of note that the outlier in this category is JP Morgan Chase, whose chief executive Jamie Dimon consistently refers to the bank as “your company” in his letters to shareholders. This stylistic—and political!—choice is enough to result in an incidence of 0.28% in the JP Morgan Chase letters, nearly twice as high a usage rate as that observed in the English corpus overall.
Whether this represents feigned humility or a sincere reminder of the power dynamic between owners and management working on their behalf, Dimon’s communication strategy seems to be successful, as his is one of the more widely–read annual CEO letters in the financial sector. This suggests for translators that a modest increase in the specific interpellation of the shareholders who are theoretically the addressee of a shareholder letter might result in somewhat more successful communication on behalf of the financial institution which has ordered a translation as part of its multilingual corporate
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4
Baseline English Translated BCV