Chantal Gagnon

Financial Innovation and Institutional Voices in the Canadian Press: A Look at the Roaring 2000s

This corpus-assisted analysis examines seven Canadian newspapers from 2001 to 2008 in English and in French. It focuses on the speech that journalists reported when covering new financial instruments, namely collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and asset-backed commercial paper. Eight years of news were surveyed with a concordancer and the data were analyzed using critical discourse analysis. The data show a wider range of voices in the English subcorpus when compared with the French. In both subcorpora, however, journalistic attitude was neutral and critical voices were deselected, while institutional voices such as those of banks were foregrounded. If polyphony is understood as the inclusion of an array of voices from the community, our study shows that the press was monophonic. Concurrently, our investigation of the Canadian press reveals that financial innovations were not covered until 2007, when credit derivatives started to falter.

Canadian translated politics at the Economic Club of New York

ABSTRACT In the course of their leadership, Canadian prime ministers often make an appearance before the Economic Club of New York (ECNY). With such an event, three cultures (i.e. American, English-Canadian and French-Canadian) are at play, along with two languages. This article inquires about the political implications of translated speeches delivered by Canadian prime ministers at the ECNY, between 1978 and 2006. Using Critical Discourse Analysis and Audience Design, this study shows that the translation shifts of some speeches were potentially based on an ideological struggle between different national discourses. The study also builds on the recent notion of ‘government by translation’ brought forward recently in institutional translation research. The translation shifts found in the corpus can have many effects but the study focuses on two specific ones: (1) legitimisation and characterisation of linguistic communities and (2) neutralisation of Canadian territory. The results of the ECNY corpus were validated with a larger corpus of Canadian parliamentary speeches. One of the aims of this work is to contribute to the general discussion of identity in institutional translation, showing among other things how identity and power questions relate to one another in a particular discursive practice.

Les anglicismes dans les discours politiques au Québec et au Canada

Cette etude met en parallele l’utilisation des anglicismes dans des discours traduits issus du gouvernement federal du Canada et dans des discours non traduits emanant du gouvernement provincial du Quebec. L’analyse du corpus parlementaire demontre que les normes d’usage varient non seulement d’un ordre de gouvernement a l’autre, mais aussi d’une categorie de locuteurs a l’autre, soit les politiques et les fonctionnaires representes ici par les traducteurs.