58
corpus averages clearly indicate that letters from financial–sector CEOs and administrators are embedded in the social processes that constitute human societies, weakening any accusations that might be leveled as to the “hubris” and failure to connect with the general populace of these corporate masters as revealed by the words they use in their missives.88
Pennebaker’s sub–categories of social processes, “family”, “friends”, and “humans”, show that the first two are less important themes in CEO letters than in English production at large, in no way surprising given that the subject matter of these letters is not particularly familial or concentrated upon friendship, but rather focused on a financial institution, its identity, its performance, and the people important to its success. That is probably why the third sub–category, with words such as “partner*”, “participant*”, and “individual*”, shows a much higher correlation between the usage rates for the letters and the baseline rate than do the results for the other two sub–categories.89 It is very interesting to note the almost identical results across these three sub–categories for the letters written originally in English and those translated from French, suggesting that for the dictionary entries in question, the performance of financial translators is mirroring perfectly the linguistic conventions in English–original texts.
Affective processes
Pennebaker is a social psychologist by training, even though much of his work has been rooted in linguistics, specifically corpus linguistics. This is abundantly evident in his word category for “Affective processes”, his largest by far, which consists of 915 words and word stems.90 Further subdivided into terms associated with positive emotions and negative emotions, this category is clearly more pertinent to psychological research than the particular angle of attack undertaken in the present research study. What is immediately surprising in our LIWC results is that both of our corpora returned usage rates for affective, or emotional, processes that were higher than the baseline: the original–English texts showed an incidence of 5.71% for affective words, and the translated texts came in at 5.07%, while the baseline calculated by Pennebaker is 4.41%.
88 Brennan 172.
89 Pennebaker (2007) 5-6.
90 Campbell et al., columns AH-AM.
59
The translations from BCV came in between the rates for our two corpora, at 5.20%
incidence.
This reflects the fact that CEO letters, far from being cold, clinical assessments of the yearly numbers, are in fact rife with emotional content and terms associated with feelings of various sorts. Indeed, while many of the required components of financial–sector annual reports represent a fairly dispassionate accounting of numbers, the optional narratives offered by CEOs in these letters serve as attempts at contextualization, and generally endeavor to paint the institution’s performance in the best possible light, even in cases where some (or all!) of the numbers are cause for concern. This is borne out by the numbers for positive and negative emotions, which show that the letters making up our corpora have higher than baseline usage rates for the former and lower than baseline rates for the latter. Indeed, the CEOs and other financial–sector leaders who communicate through these letters strive to generate positive emotions in their readers, generally individual and institutional shareholders and stakeholders, in order to shore up support for the institutions they direct and oversee. Our LIWC analysis results point to this softer, more touchy–feely side of the financial sector, one that is, according to this analysis, couched in (largely positive) emotion–laden terms. Once again, these categories show great similarity in the usage rates for translated and untranslated letters, suggesting that this is an area in which financial translators working on behalf of French–language banks are quite effectively reproducing the conventions for linguistic structures within which corporate communication strategies are embedded by banking CEOs and their communication teams in the Anglosphere.
60 Graph 17: Usage rates for affective process terms
Cognitive processes
Pennebaker has selected 730 words and stems for a large category of what he calls
“cognitive processes”.91 These are further subdivided into eight sub–categories: “Insight”,
“Causation”, “Discrepancy”, “Tentative”, “Certainty”, “Inhibition”, “Inclusive”, and
“Exclusive”.92 The LIWC analysis of the frequency of use of words in the Cognitive Processes category overall shows that while translated shareholder letters exhibit an incidence slightly lower than that of the baseline, 13.21% compared to 15.37%, the letters originally penned in English show a higher–than–baseline use rate of 17.12%.
While it might be tempting to immediately ascribe a certain calculating, Machiavellian personality trait to the financial–sector CEOs behind these letters, it is doubtless more pragmatic to examine the sub–categories for further clues as to the communicative processes that could be at work here. Instead, our LIWC results show that the overall usage rates do not indicate the same proportionality across all sub–categories. Indeed, in four of the sub–categories–insight, discrepancy, tentative, and exclusive–the baseline rates are actually higher than the rates in both the translated or untranslated letters, which suggests that no rush to judgment is warranted here since half of the cognitive processes identified by Pennebaker are actually underrepresented in terms of usage rates in our financial–sector corporate communication texts. However, the four
91 Campbell et al., columns AY-BC.
92 Pennebaker (2007) 5-6.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6
Baseline English Translated BCV