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Transdisciplinarity in Applied Linguistics
Edited by Daniel Perrin and Claire Kramsch
[AILA Review 31] 2018
► pp. 81–112

The language of numbers

Transdisciplinary action research and financial communication

| Zurich University of Applied Sciences
Wider parts of society-at-large are not fluent in the language of numbers, and financial literacy in particular is low in many countries (OECD, 2014). This paper shows how research on financial communication with and for practitioners (Cameron, Frazer, Rampton, & Richardson, 1992, p. 22) can foster intra-lingual translation in the financial sector, which increases financial texts’ communicative potential and finally enables laypersons to better understand the language of numbers. Such an increased understanding allows individuals to set up investment plans for their current and future wealth and, for example, make informed decisions about their pension plans. By doing so, financial crises on the individual, organizational, and societal level can be avoided, which benefits social welfare and society-at-large.
Transdisciplinary Action Research (TDA) offers a framework and procedures to approach such goals through close collaboration of scholars and practitioners throughout research projects. Following TDA core concepts, a cyclic process of research and development has been established in the last two decades (e.g. Perrin, this volume; Whitehouse, 2014). Whereas applied linguists involved aimed at better understanding practices of writing and intra-lingual translation at the interface of technical and everyday language, stakeholders from the financial industry wanted to improve their communication. The representatives of society-at-large, finally, were interested in contributing to sustainably increasing financial literacy.
In the first part of the present paper, I sketch the suitability of transdisciplinarity in general and TDA in particular in financial communication (Section 1). Then I define the key concepts of intra-lingual translation, communicative potential, and financial literacy (Section 2). Next, I outline the data corpus and explain how TDA was applied in a series of research projects (Section 3). The presented results on a macro-level shed light on the financial analysts’ situation and practices in their multilingual workplace: the findings on the micro-level suggest that financial analysts’ texts pose a risk of partial communicative failure (Section 4). The article concludes by indicating empirically based measures to develop financial literacy, intra-lingual translation across stakeholders and texts’ communicative potential in finance (Section 5).
Keywords: transdisciplinarity, financial literacy, intra-lingual translation, communicative potential
Article outline
  • 1.Financial communication and transdisciplinarity
  • 2.Definition of key terms
  • 3.Method and data
    • 3.1Research framework and methods
    • 3.2Text markers and measures
      • 3.2.1Markers of cross-disciplinary knowledge transformation
      • 3.2.2Markers of intra-lingual translation
    • 3.3Data coding
    • 3.4Data corpora
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Macro-findings
      • 4.1.1Financial analysts in multi-layered contexts
      • 4.1.2Practices: The workplace toolset
    • 4.2Micro-findings
      • 4.2.1Results for markers of cross-disciplinary knowledge transformation
      • 4.2.2Results for markers of intra-lingual translation
    • 4.3Triangulation of macro and micro findings
  • 5.Conclusion and implementation
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 12 March 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/aila.00014.whi
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