The French Terminology of Consolidated Statements of Profit or Loss: A Status Quo.

This paper deals with language variation in the terminology of consolidated financial statements in French. It analyzes the terminology used by listed companies in different French-speaking countries. The paper investigates how the International Financial Reporting Standards developed by the International Accounting Standards Board have been applied at a linguistic level. For this purpose, a small, specialized corpus of consolidated statements of profit or loss from companies in Belgium, Canada, France, Morocco and Switzerland has been built. The analysis pertains to a variety of aspects relevant to translation pedagogy and practice: terminology, language variation, and business, in particular financial, communication. The results reveal terminological practices in accounting language data from authentic contexts of usage. As such, they help bridge the gap between the profession and academia in translator training. At the same time, they show that the level of harmonization and standardization in the language of accounting is lower than might be expected.