Lady Macbeth, Sleeping Beauty and Other Characters: Creative M&A Metaphors in English and Italian

The language of finance and investment has been one of my main interests for some years now. Thus, this article stems from my previous research on the pervasiveness of metaphorical expressions in the highly specialized language of international finance as well as the role played by Anglicisms in the language of finance in Italian. Moreover, it draws from two of the main tenets of Conceptual Metaphor Theory; namely, the principle that metaphors are crucial in our perception of reality, as they help us understand novel concepts by using familiar domains and the principle that we create metaphors to verbalize new ideas and unknown situations, so that metaphors often appear in novel domains which lack the necessary vocabulary. Starting from these premises, I first analyze the creative metaphors in the language of finance in English selected from both the corpus of investment banking lexicon compiled by Bielenia-Grajewska (2009) and Investopedia, the largest on-line dictionary of financial terms. The highest number of creative metaphors in the language of finance – a field constantly evolving where neologisms are produced everyday— belong to the financial services sector of funds and investment and to the financial services sector of investment banking, two sectors where strong emotions are involved as they deal with risky investment products and financial instruments together with high-stake financial transactions and activities. Then, I investigate if and how the cultural references embedded in the original English metaphors are a) understandable in an intercultural context, b) translated into Italian, and c) if they have an equivalent in Italian, what techniques were used to translate them. Besides achieving the above-mentioned research goals, my analyses will help me continue assessing the degree of Anglicization of the language of finance in Italian.