30 09 2019
4 Common Mistakes To Avoid In Financial Translation
The financial service industry is evolving continuously. An organization offering financial services, if limits its engagement to specific regions or to a particular group of people, then it might lose a major chunk of the market. In order to become a global player, it needs to spreads its wings across the globe. This requires internationalization of services, and for that to happen, it needs to localize for a given target market.
Financial translation is an important aspect of localization. By translating your company’s financial literature such as reports, research services, cash flow statements, business plans, financial software, training manuals, customer support material and more, you can make sure that you are talking to your target market in a language that they understand. This makes your business stand apart from the competition.
Being a complex task, financial translation requires a core understanding of the language in which the document is to be translated and also good know how of specific financial concepts which are to be translated. Therefore, it’s important to work with the most experienced and reputed financial translation agency that can handle a wide array of your financial translation projects. The idea is to give you an overview of financial translations so that you know where and how you must use the services of a financial translation company.
What is Financial Translation Service?
Financial translation deals with the translation of documents related to the finance and banking sector. It involves various types of reports and documents. Financial translation requires subject matter expert, who is highly trained as a translator and has 5+ years of experience in the specified field.
Financial translation services are in high demand these days because the financial concepts, terms and language differ from country to country, which requires the translator to be a subject matter expert. Some countries have particular guidelines for financial documents in terms of numbering, formatting and use of specific terms. Therefore, when we talk about financial document translation services, these guidelines must be taken into consideration to receive quality services.
Some of the financial documents that are often translated :
✔ Auditor’s reports
✔ Income statements
✔ Regulatory documents
✔ Balance Sheets
✔ Annual Reports
✔ Cash Flow Statements
✔ Government tax reports
✔ Business Plans
✔ Foreign exchange
✔ Disclosures
✔ Application forms
✔ Prospectus
✔ Private and Public Offerings
✔ Equities
✔ Bonds
✔ Commodities
✔ Financial agreements
✔ Documents related to insurance
From the above list, it is clear that, there are different types of financial documents and the translation style for each document varies.There may be several variations in the styles and formatting of financial documents, but financial translators follow best practices while handling financial translations. Inspite of the special care taken by the experts, there are few common mistakes that can affect the translations badly. Let us know in detail about these mistakes, to avoid them in the future.
4 Mistakes To Avoid In Financial Translation:
The financial translator’s work has to be free of any errors. Any small mistake can cost the business a heavy amount. Let’s dive deep into understanding the 4 most common financial translation mistakes.
1. The Punctuation Mistake
We feel that translating numbers would be an easy task, whereas that’s not the reality. Even a smallest mistake can create a huge impact while translating numbers and financial terminologies. A financial translator needs to be a subject matter expert to carry out such risky translations with ease.
For example: In India, we take 5, 50,000 as five lakh and fifty thousand, but in the US the same number is taken as five hundred and fifty thousand. Therefore, when translating from Indian to the American market, such minor punctuation mistakes should be taken care of.
2. Misinterpretation Of Numbers
When you make an effort to report the numbers appropriately, you also have to interpret the context correctly because the nuances, in some cases, are very important.
The main goal of translation should be to report the numbers with appropriate meaning. While interpretations may go wrong sometimes, resulting in panic and chaos within the financial markets, the nuances therefore created, are dominant in the global market.
3. Mistranslation Of A Nuance
Let us understand the mistranslation of a nuance by considering an example. An article about the Continental Illinois bank was published by the Commodity News Service in 1994. In this article, rumors were reported that a Japanese bank had planned to take over the former because of some financial problems. In the Japanese translation, the word “rumor” becomes “announcement”. As a result of this, the Continental Illinois payables and customers rushed immediately to claim their dues. The State was forced to help the bank by giving $ 8 billion to it, in order to save it from a bad translation.
Sometimes a bad translation leads to high degree impacts that challenge the existence of the firm. Therefore, utmost care should be taken while translating the documents, whether the financial translation takes place online or offline through an agency.
4. Ambiguous Messages
Many a times, the most powerful entities are also not immune to the translation mistakes. For example : In 2009, HSBC bank’s Slogan was “Assume nothing”. A call to action, which in many countries will be mistranslated as “Do nothing”. A few years later, the bank did a rebranding that cost it $ 10 million.
These are the common mistakes that may occur in financial document translations. So, in order to avoid costly mistakes like the ones mentioned above, you need to hire the services of a reliable translation agency and hire specialized professional translators.
In an innovative industry like banking and finance, there are always new products and terminologies that keep being updated. Translation companies have to keep themselves updated on the developments taking place in the finance industry because financial translations are often complex.
Globalization enables banks and various types of companies to establish offices in different parts of the world. While English is used as the language of business, it is vital for financial institutions to provide critical information in different languages too. Hence financial translation services are very important for the banking and finance industries.
We Understand The Finance Industry
Most translation clients have short deadlines and Shakti Enterprise is known for delivering translations at the shortest time possible. Fully understanding the needs of the clients helps us in making our translation process faster and smoother. This results in high quality work being delivered.
It is important to understand the significance of relying on professional translators to perform financial translations that offer high-quality services and also understand how the poor quality or incorrect translation can affect the brand image of a company.
The work of a translator is not easy and doing financial translations requires expertise as well as good amount of experience. Our translators are native speakers and subject matter experts who have the ability to handle specific business translation requirements quickly. We handle every aspect of translation as we offer a full suite of language services. If you need translation, localization, interpretation or any other language services, feel free to contact us.
Financial Translation Service Provider
Shakti Enterprise is an ISO 9001: 2008 language interpretation and translation service company having industry experience of 33 years. With offices in Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, we are committed to breaking all communications barriers which can create obstacles in your business. We provide translation in 100+ languages and our main USPs include quick turnaround time, proficient translation and translation accuracy guarantee.
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