Universal or culture-specific metaphors in economics? A corpus study of original vs translated Italian

This paper compares the use of metaphor in a corpus of Italian economic reports (standard sources of economic information), and Italian newspaper and magazine articles and articles from The Economist translated into Italian (popular economics). The aim is to identify differences in the frequency and types of metaphors in reports as opposed to articles and in original Italian versus translated articles with a view to detecting text-typological and/or culture-specific features of metaphor-building in Italian economics. First, wordlists of the three sub-corpora are created; second, keywords are extracted using economic reports as the reference sub-corpus and KWIC concordances are run to investigate differences in the use or kinds of metaphors in the two text types analysed. Third, further candidate metaphors were studied on the basis of wordlists reflecting typical world hypotheses in economics. Finally, concordances of keywords and further candidate metaphors were run to investigate if there are culture-specific metaphors in the three sub-corpora.