La dénomination métaphorique financière « hedge fund », entre démétaphorisation par la traduction et charge axiologique. Une étude comparée anglais, français, italien

Abstract

The aim of this paper is three-fold. First, it will focus on the metaphorical term in English «hedge » fund”, which belongs to the world of financial investments, and on the French and Italian equivalents offered by terminology databases and online terminographic resources. Second, it will survey the nature of linguistic obscurity in the world of finance, the technicalities of hedge funds and the origin of the constitutive and founding metaphor of the creative type « hedge », Third, it will reconstruct the reasons for the choice of « demetaphorizing » equivalents, such as « fonds spéculatif » in French and « fondo speculativo » in Italian, as well as the type of semantic prosody they bring with them. It will argue that, regardless of the underlying reasons for the choice of a demetaphorizing noun by the French Terminology Commissions and the Italian legislator, the axiological ambivalence that is inherent in the concept of « speculation » ends up providing a negative connotation to these translational equivalents, in particular when these uses leave the technical domain and enter those of media and standard discourse.