Issues in transnational financial reporting: A linguistic analysis

Financial reporting involves the publication of financial statements (profit and loss account, balance sheet, etc.) together with supplementary material such as notes, a management report and a report by independent auditors. Developments such as that of the Single European Market and, more generally, the internationalisation of financial markets, have led to an increasing tendency for large European business organisations to undertake what may be termed ’transnational financial reporting’, using one or more languages in addition to the language of the original report. Our research indicates that such reporting raises a number of interesting issues in Linguistics. One of these issues falls into the domain of Semantics, and concerns the extent to which the professional registers of accounting and finance in different countries exhibit semantic equivalence. Other issues fall into the domain of Pragmatics. Translating the report of the independent auditors can pose various kinds of problems of either a pragmalinguistic or a socio‐pragmatic nature, and a number of ‘coping strategies’ are employed. Quite apart from the significance of transnational financial reporting for financial and business professionals in Europe and the substantial resources devoted to it, we suggest that these problems are inherently interesting from a linguistic point of view.