What exactly is financial translation, and when do you need it?
Financial translation is the translation of any written material that includes financial terminology. That could be for instance your company’s income statements, bank statements, user interfaces, economic reports, leases, prospectuses, annual reports and so on. Even legal contracts can include a lot of financial jargon.
So, you need financial translation when you are taking your business abroad — whether that means working with a foreign partner, opening a branch in another country, buying from a foreign provider, or having your support and user interface content translated if you’re running a fintech or a financial marketplace.
All these processes involve financial content, and it’s important that it’s translated with a maximum of accuracy. Only then you can be sure that all stakeholders are on the same page, and that you are obeying the rules of legal compliance in the other country.
So, how can you go about ensuring your financial translation is accurate?
You might think that the best thing to do is to have someone bilingual in your financial department translate your financial documents — it will save you the time of having to find external translators, and you won’t need to pay someone external, the only cost being them spending time. And to be honest, in some cases this option may well work — for instance, if your company is small, you have few financial documents to translate, and you are fortunate to have a finance expert who happens to be fluent in the language of the country you’re expanding into.
But what if you don’t have any finance experts who speak this particular language? And if the people in your team who do speak that language are not knowledgeable about finance at all? Or what if there’s a huge volume of documents and only one bilingual expert in your team?
That’s when you might be tempted to hire a few external translators and let them do the job. But here are the challenges that make it doubtful this is the best way to go about it:
- First, there’s no way you can ensure the accuracy of the translation — unless you have someone you trust who is fluent in the target language, has knowledge of the financial domain, and is available to check the translation for you.
- Second, if anything goes wrong — say, you realize you hired two good translators and one bad translator, so you have some documents translated well, and others translated poorly — you will have to spend more time and money having the faulty translation corrected or even done all over again.
- Third, you will spend a lot of time coordinating the work of independent translators — or else you will run the risk of finding out that your freelance translators have been using different translations for the same word, that your documents come across as rather puzzling, and their clarity is compromised.
- Fourth, if you have any confidential financial documents to translate, you may well worry whether the freelancers you hired won’t leak any classified data.
- Fifth, do those translators have an indemnity insurance to cover for potential mistakes that lead to heavy losses on your side or on your client’s side?
So, what is your best option for financial translation? You’ve surely seen this coming — your best option is to work with a reliable, ISO-certified provider of financial translation services.
Notice that we don’t say you should work with a “translation company”. Because a provider of translation services is more than just that. Companies like Upwords don’t just connect you with translation professionals, collect a fee, and leave. Instead, we accompany you through every stage of the process. We find the best translators for your project — native speakers with proven expertise in the financial field —, we help you draw a translation calendar, coordinate the translators’ work to ensure vocabulary accuracy and consistency, and run the translation through quality checks.
What’s more, we follow confidentiality protocols to ensure that your sensitive financial data stays protected.
Understanding the importance of working with qualified professionals makes all the difference for your financial translation to be high-quality. When you hire the services of a translation company, it’s possible you pay more in the short term — but in the long run, you will save time and money, and have real peace of mind.
