Aspetti propedeutici della traduzione economico-finanziaria: l’orientamento alla futurità nell’informativa societaria, tra effetti perlocutivi, inferenze predittive ed implicitezza

This paper aims to provide an overview of one of the constitutive coordinates of economic and financial information: future-based orientation. This is examined from the perspective of the translation of economic and financial texts. Leaving aside the concept of futurity as encoded by morphosyntax, it illustrates how the pervasiveness of the future-oriented vision in such texts derives from a mixture of perlocutionary effect, predictive inference, and partial implicitness. The paper focuses on one particular domain of financial terminology, looking at direct information-giving instances such as “buy-back” and “profit warning”, and indirect ones such as recommended investments and the recently instituted “forward guidance” of the European Central Bank. Aiming to declare in advance the timing of possible actions which could affect markets, “forward guidance” constitutes a tool to control future expectations.