Translating Discussion and Analysis of French Financial Statements

• A financial translator is likely to encounter texts that reproduce and comment on selected items from a company's financial statements far more frequently than the statements themselves. This presentation will focus on translating "financial highlights" as they may appear in reports by equity and credit analysts, selling memoranda, news stories, or press releases by the company itself. It will not dwell on the accounting intricacies you may have to deal with only if you are translating the detailed statements complete with notes.

• The presentation will provide an overview of the structure of the French (nouveau plan comptable) income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement, with a discussion of commonly accepted English translations for the major line items. If the client has not specified a set of terms to use in English, the translator will have to choose one, and at least four different terminology models--UK, US, IAS, EU--are available. Often, the target audience will be the worldwide English-speaking financial community, and the localization model of terminology choice will not apply.

• The presentation will conclude with a discussion of the derived measures often used by analysts, such as margins, ratios, growth rates and "underlying" earnings.

• Speaker: Robert Killingsworth