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communication strategy. Given the vanishingly low incidence of “you” words extant in our translated texts, it is conceivable that a single addition in the translation of a shareholder letter of average length would be enough to bring a translated letter closer into line with the rates of second–person pronoun usage observed in our English–
language corpus.
Third person singular
“He” and “she” words do not have a significant footprint in the linguistic identity of shareholder letters, either written originally in English or French. Although this category of words makes up 1.77% of general English usage as observed by Pennebaker, in our corpora we find only 0.12% of our English–original texts, and half that percentage, or 0.06%, of our French–original texts being made up of third–person singular pronouns.
Indeed, many of the individual banks and financial institutions in our corpora have no third–person singular usage at all. While the English–original texts have twice as high a rate of usage for words in this category as do the translated texts, the incidence in both is so low as to render this category marginal in the overall linguistic profile of our primary texts.
The LIWC results in this category do not inspire a deeper qualitative analysis of these terms, except insofar as analyzing their relative absence could prove somewhat intriguing. However, bearing in mind the generic specificities at play here, we would expect to have senior executives discussing things from their perspective and from the personified bank’s perspective, while discussions of specific people in such a macro context would be unusual to say the least, and therefore the results in this category are not all that surprising. The results from the LIWC analysis of the letters translated at BCV, which feature no third–person singular pronouns, serve to emphasize the marginal nature of these pronoun forms in the financial reporting texts at hand, and do not suggest this category as likely to prove fertile ground for follow–up research.
Third person plural
Personal pronouns associated with “they”77 represent just 0.65% of average English language production as determined by Pennebaker. In our corpora, we find that shareholder letters from financial institutions, regardless of whether they were originally
77 Campbell et al., column J.
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written in English or French, show rates that would appear to correspond quite closely to this baseline. English–original letters come in at 0.79%, while those translated from French to English used third–person plural personal pronouns for 0.60% of their volume in words, an LSM of .86. However, the relative rarity of “they” words in baseline usage of English actually makes these results more divergent than they appear. While a difference of 0.05 or 0.14 is quite small in terms of whole numbers, as a percentage of another relatively small number we see that in fact there is wider variance here. Indeed, while the French–original texts show nearly 10% less usage of “they” words than the baseline, the English–original letters actually show 25% higher prevalence of these pronouns than what is observed in the language as a whole. The relatively low volume, however, means that we should take caution in ascribing too much meaning to this variance, as accuracy of percentage analysis declines with volume, and in this case the actual volume is relatively low. Nevertheless, these results bear out the observation that personal pronoun usage is not consistent between baseline English and the texts included in our corpus, and continue to point to personal pronouns as a linguistic element likely to produce interesting observations specific to the language style of shareholder letters from financial institutions, and also to the differences that can be observed between such letters written originally in English and those translated into English from original French–language texts.
The results from the texts translated at BCV show an incidence of 0.74% for this category, marking third–person plural forms as a language aspect in which the BCV is more closely aligned to English–drafted texts than the other translations. As to the outliers in this LIWC category, we observe that Wells Fargo exhibits by far the highest incidence of third–
person plural pronoun usage, at 1.37%, more than twice as high a rate as the baseline rate observed by Pennebaker. The lowest incidence is from BPCE, at only 0.19%. The fact that the usage rates in this category vary by a factor of greater than ten shows that this is a category showing significant variation at the micro level, and a qualitative analysis of
“they” words, including exploration of the antecedents of these pronouns, could be expected to yield some interesting results. However, the relatively modest representation of third–person plural pronouns in our corpus texts also suggests that richer veins of linguistic phenomena are likely to be awaiting deeper investigation subsequent to completion of the present quantitative analysis.
39 Articles
Pennebaker’s category containing articles is by far his most concise, as this breakdown really tracks only three words: “a”, “an”, and “the”.78 These three words, and some compounds of which they are the root, make up according to Pennebaker’s baseline 6.30% of all word use in English, making each of these three words among the most frequently utilized in the entire language. Our English–original corpus shows a high degree of similarity with this baseline, with an incidence of articles coming in at 6.97% of total production. The letters translated at BCV show a usage rate for articles of 6.93%, essentially identical to that of the English–written letters. The result for the corpus of translated texts is more surprising, as we see a significantly higher representation of articles in these shareholder letters, amounting to 8.73% of the total, or nearly a quarter higher rate of usage, representing an LSM of .84 and only fairly strong synchrony.
Graph 8: Usage rates for articles
This strongly suggests that translators are failing to omit articles in situations where doing so is grammatically and stylistically possible, unlike the English–language writers of shareholder letters in the Anglosphere.
An in–depth analysis of article usage by means of a traditional concordance would be straightforward in the low number of words to track, but tedious given the extremely high frequency with which these words are used, and for this reason would seem to
78 Campbell et al., column L.
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Baseline English Translated BCV