Investigating positive/negative bias in Canadian newspapers through translation: a study of ‘confidence’ in a corpus of business news

ABSTRACT

Used as gauges of positivity and negativity in the press, the words ‘confidence’ and ‘confiance’ are analysed in a 2.7-million-word bilingual sub-corpus of CAPCOF, a 9-million-word corpus of economic and financial news extracted from seven Canadian newspapers. Focused on the year 2008 of the financial crisis, results show that the English-language media foresee a better tomorrow and are more positive than their French-language counterparts. Ultimately, however, a positivity bias emerges in both languages. The critical discourse analysis shows that the main point of convergence between the two linguistic media communities is the interdiscursive dynamics through which the informative discourse of the media and the promotional discourse of the financial establishment meld together seamlessly. In this study, translation is employed in its broadened definition, encompassing intralingual activity as the locus of interdiscursivity, rewording and recontextualization.

KEYWORDS:

• Computer-assisted critical discourse analysis
• news translation
• positivity bias negativity bias
• confidence
• interdiscursivity

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the two anonymous referees for their insightful comments. Academia would not be the same without quality reviews.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, grant reference 435-2020-1023. The data the analysis was based on can be accessed at: https://doi.org/10.5683/SP3/JBLRTS

Notes on contributors

Chantal Gagnon

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.

Pier-Pascale Boulanger

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.