https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9052-6943
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ABSTRACT
Despite new transparency regulation in 2002, a lack of transparency was identified only five years later among the causes of the financial crisis in North America. With this paradox in mind, the authors investigated the terms ‘transparency’ and ‘transparence’ in a corpus of seven Canadian newspapers (English and French) comprising nine million words, from the Dot-com crash of 2001 to the subprime crisis of 2007–2008. When contrasted with a test corpus of annual reports, the press corpus showed that during this period journalists mentioned ‘transparency’ intermittently, and most frequently in 2007–2008, whereas the banks used it with a steady increase. When represented on a Transparency Perception Continuum, the data showed the press as critically pointing to a lack of transparency, and the banks as positively or neutrally discussing transparency. It was also evidenced that English-Canadian reporters used a wider array of sources than did their French-speaking counterparts when recasting statements on transparency. The francophone press seldom quoted American sources, selecting instead statements originally made in French by local banks in the province of Québec. The findings show that by avoiding translation the French-Canadian press contributed to a more bank-centric view on transparency, entangled in the production of a dominant discourse.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the following students for their help: Marc Pomerleau, Esmaeil Kalantari and Mathieu Rolland.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Pier-Pascale Boulanger is professor of financial, economic and literary translation at Concordia University. She has coauthored several papers on the financial discourse in the Canadian press and chairs the Observatory of Financial Discourse in Translation.
Chantal Gagnon is an associate professor at Université de Montréal, where she teaches business and economic translation. She has published several articles on power issues in translation, dealing mainly with Canadian politics, the news and institutions.
ORCID
Pier-Pascale Boulanger http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9052-6943
Chantal Gagnon http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9085-0839
Notes
* The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.5683/SP/NPOOFB.
1 The annual reports of the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ) show a steady increase in the use of derivative instruments: amounts receivable for futures, swaps and options accounted for at fair value rose from $CAN 983 million in 2001 (CDPQ, Citation2001, p. 61) to $CAN 15,933 million in 2008 (CDPQ, Citation2008, p. 94).
2 As explained by Fernandes (Citation2006), the initial typology for corpora in translation research and pedagogy offered by Baker in Citation1995 was quite useful, but needed reworking. Laviosa (Citation2002) has also revisited Baker’s typology, in which a comparable corpus originally consisted of two separate collections of texts in the same language, one set being originals and the other being translations. For Laviosa (Citation2002) and Fernandes (Citation2006), a bilingual comparable corpus now consists of two sets of texts, one in language A and one in language B.
3 In terms of total weekly circulation, the English and French sets of newspapers included in CAPCOF each accounted for approximately a third of all paid dailies measured by News Media Canada for 2008: 29% for the English subcorpus (6,585,842 copies out of 22,452,101 copies from 87 English-language papers overall) and 34% for the French subcorpus (1,895,561 copies out of 5,579,003 copies from 11 French-language papers overall).