Financial translations – where a comma changes everything
For companies looking to expand their foreign markets through multilingual translation, the stakes are high. As your brand crosses international borders you will need to have a strategy on how to best communicate with customers and keep the company stable.
From the outside looking in financial translation is often misunderstood as simple. Some translation service providers focus on literal translation, but in our case accurate numerical translation is just as important. In fact, inaccurate punctuation and value confusion are just some of the main reasons for errors.
Even the simplest translation mistakes can cause major problems. Note that the US writes currency with a decimal point as the separator between dollars and cents, while some countries use a comma to indicate this separation. In the cultural context, even between countries that share a language, between “1,000” and “1.000” can be a crucial difference. Now imagine these are repeated mistakes in annual reports, balance sheets or other legal documents.
That’s why at Valley Center translation offices we care about the accuracy of financial translations, correlated with the understanding of the financial legal regulations of the respective country.
Numeric values, punctuation, abbreviations, and content localization all need to be considered.
We have over 10 years of experience in translating the following types of financial documents for companies, financial institutions, institutions and public authorities:
- Annual reports
- Income statements
- Invoices/receipts/tax receipts/proformas
- Balance Sheets/Balance of Payments/10-K
- Cash flow statements
- Auditors’ reports
- State tax reports
- Financial reporting guidelines
- Business plans
- Prospectuses
- Private and public offers
- Related insurance documents