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notoriously complex in the English language, particularly where phrasal verbs are concerned, and it is not beyond the realm of possibility that financial translators are increasing the relative prevalence of prepositions in their translations through taking advantage of the possibilities offered by such combined constructions of verbs and prepositions to resolve particularly tricky translation conundrums—even a relatively small number of such turns of phrase could prove sufficient to tilt the numbers in favor of preposition use just enough to explain the slightly increased incidence of prepositions observed through our LIWC analysis.
In any event, the numbers in this category do not seem to suggest a call to action for financial translators, and ultimately provide a snapshot of extant practices, which certainly are not so divergent from the norm as to require urgent revisiting. However, it is suggestive that the outlier in this category is once again JP Morgan Chase, whose frequency rate of 13.97% is the closest to the baseline of all the institutions in our sample, further strengthening that bank’s positioning in this survey as in many ways the most remarkable single element of the corpora. That being said, it is of course not possible to determine definitively (or even tentatively…) that this lower incidence of preposition usage compared to other financial institutions constitutes some sort of overt communication strategy on the part of Jamie Dimon and his (he would say, “your”) company, but it further underscores a growing impression that if a single bank were to be singled out for additional scrutiny, JP Morgan Chase would certainly be the frontrunner in the choice of a research target.
Conjunctions
28 words compose Pennebaker’s category of conjunctions,83 making this a category in which he was able to be fairly comprehensive.84 Pennebaker assesses baseline conjunction use as corresponding to 6.35% of overall word use in English. Our corpora show very similar results to this baseline usage rate, with 6.47% for the original–English corpus and 5.39% for the translated corpus. The translations drafted at BCV were in line with the other translations, at 5.20%, a usage rate lower than any single English–language
83 One wonders if this category might have inspired Pennebaker’s term “function” words, featuring as it does in a notable US musical educational cartoon that first aired in February 1973, with music and lyrics by Bob Dorough—the refrain is “Conjunction junction, what’s your function?”
84 Campbell et al., column W.
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financial institution from our corpus, and thus somewhat of a flag for further investigation, at least on an in–house basis. This is perhaps not too surprising given that conjunctions are some of the prototypical “function” words in that they carry meaning only insofar as they alter and nuance the meaning of the terms and phrases for which they provide articulation. These terms (the list includes “and”, “as”, “because”, “but”, “if”,
“or”, “so”, and “then”) are impossible—barring the sort of effort dear to members of OuLiPo—to avoid, and are therefore unsurprisingly present in fairly consistent proportions throughout our observed samples as well as in baseline usage.
This is a case where it is quite possible that the specific conjunctions being employed might differ to an extent between the original English texts and the translations, and a qualitative analysis of each of the 28 words in this category would be able to determine this fairly efficiently, but the quantitative LIWC analysis in this research study is merely able to confirm a striking consistency between conjunction frequency in shareholder letters written originally in or translated into English, as well as in general language use.
This, then, would not appear to be a language feature that LIWC points to as a likely area for further digging, but rather one of the cases where the mechanics of sentence construction seems to lead to very low variance between our different corpus elements.
Indeed, only a single financial institution from our corpora really stands out as returning results far outside the norm: Compagnie Financière Tradition, with their showing of only 3.27%. It is not immediately obvious from the LIWC analysis results whether this corresponds to a simple statistical “blip” or if in fact there is something inherent in the prose offered by that institution’s translators that resulted in its numbers being so markedly lower in conjunction usage rates than its peer institutions, and the apparent unlikelihood of further study proving relevant pushes any follow–up research on this particular detail of our LIWC results fairly far down a theoretical priority list.
Negations
There are 57 terms and stems that comprise Pennebaker’s category of negations.85 His usage baseline is 1.65% of English production, and the LIWC analysis of our corpora clearly shows that shareholder letters are by their nature significantly less prone to negative statements than the average in English texts. In fact, our English–drafted texts show an incidence of 0.60% for negation words, less than half the baseline rate, or an LSM
85 Campbell et al., column X.
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of .53. The texts translated from French come in at only 0.35% usage of negation words, less than a quarter of the general usage in the English language, and roughly half the rate in the shareholder letters from the Anglosphere, scoring an LSM of .74 compared to the English letters. The letters at BCV are even more resolutely positive, showing an incidence of only 0.16%, an LSM of .42 compared to the letters originally written in English.
Graph 14: Usage rates for negations
To understand why the shareholder letters from the US, English–speaking Canada, and the UK are significantly less prone to negation than the dominant language in those regions requires once again contextualization of the texts themselves. These letters, which represent a voluntary form of disclosure on the part of the financial–sectors entities concerned, are as a rule written with the express intent of giving a favorable interpretation to the situation of those companies. Therefore, even when the macro economy is facing challenges (which was more frequently the case for our selection of companies during the first year or two under study than the later years), we would expect these letters to provide a narrative in which the bank is steadily forging ahead, even against headwinds. For that reason, negated verbs and descriptors should be expected to represent a fairly small subset of the sentences in our texts, most likely involving the rejection of negativity itself, such as “we have not faltered” or “we did not stray from our core values”.
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4 1.6 1.8
Baseline English Translated BCV