From chiffre d’affaires to turnover and from revenue to produits: An LSP approach to financial translation.

In the field of specialized practices of translation, business and economic translation in general and financial translation in particular have been neglected by academic research in translation studies so far, regardless of their economic value. Drawing on a previous investigation of the French terminology of consolidated statements of profit or loss in the age of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) (Leibbrand 2018), this paper suggests an LSP approach to financial translation. Conceptually, it draws on a business communication and specialized discourse approach with a focus on financial communication and on knowledge management in specialized translation. The paper focuses on a highly specialized genre and deals with language variation in the terminology of consolidated financial statements in English and French. Based on the analysis of the terminology used by listed companies in different French-speaking countries and the investigation on how IFRS have been applied at a linguistic level (Leibbrand 2018), the English and French terminology used by these companies has been analyzed and compared. Furthermore, the investigation considered the translational nature of the bilingual financial terminology. The results describe the variation within English and French terminology of consolidated statements of profit or loss. Moreover, they illustrate bilingual functional equivalence and translational variation. They reveal terminological practices as well as practices of translation and accounting by delivering language data from authentic contexts of professional usage in financia reporting and communication.