Financial Translation Services

• FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) — regulates firms providing financial services to consumers and small businesses. Sourcebook terminology (COBS, MCOB, SUP) is precise; we translate against the published FCA Handbook.
• PRA (Prudential Regulation Authority) — oversees banks, insurers, and major investment firms. Pillar 3 disclosures, ICAAP and ORSA documents have their own terminology.
• ESMA — pan-EU regulator. PRIIPs Regulation, MiFID II, MAR all carry binding terminology in 24 EU languages. ESMA's official translations are the reference.
• HMRC — UK tax and customs. CT600, VAT, transfer-pricing documentation each have specific terminology.
• IFRS Foundation — the standard setter for IFRS. The IFRS Taxonomy is the authoritative source for translated terminology and we align to it.
• The IRRBB, Basel III/IV, Solvency II, IORP II frameworks — each has a specific glossary published by EBA, EIOPA, or the BIS.

• Annual report. The narrative sections (Strategic Report, Directors' Report) follow corporate-tone register. The financial statements follow IFRS terminology rigidly. The auditor's report follows ISA terminology. We split the document and assign different linguists per section.
• Prospectus. Risk factors, terms and conditions, taxation summary, and selling restrictions each need a linguist with that specialism — corporate lawyer for T&Cs, tax specialist for taxation, regulatory specialist for restrictions.
• Fund KID (Key Information Document, PRIIPs). Tight word limit, regulator-defined headings, performance scenarios required in a specific format. We work to ESMA's PRIIPs RTS, not a freelancer's interpretation.
• Audit report. Following ISA 700 (Revised). The opinion paragraph is non-negotiable in wording — a translator who paraphrases is a translator we don't use.

• "Property, plant and equipment" in French is "Immobilisations corporelles" per the IFRS Taxonomy. Not "Biens, installations et équipements" (literal translation), not "Actifs corporels" (close but wrong), not "Immobilisations matérielles" (older terminology). The Foundation's term is the only one a French analyst reading your IFRS-compliant statements will expect.
• "Right-of-use asset" (IFRS 16) in German is "Nutzungsrechte" per the Foundation, not "Recht auf Nutzung von Vermögenswerten".
• "Other comprehensive income" in Spanish is "Otro resultado integral", not "Otros ingresos comprensivos".

Analysts, auditors and regulators read translated statements with a mental model built on the Foundation's terminology. Variant translations create friction — and in the worst case, regulatory queries. An IFRS-aligned translation is a marker of professional competence; a literal translation is a marker of an agency that does not specialise.

We load the IFRS Taxonomy into our termbase at project start. Every IFRS term in your source document is matched against the taxonomy and the target-language term is enforced in CAT-tool QA. No translator can ship a financial statement with a non-aligned IFRS term in the output.

1. Translator qualifications. MITI (Member of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting) or MCIL (Member of the Chartered Institute of Linguists) is the UK baseline. The relevant specialism (Finance, Legal, etc.) on top of that.
2. Financial qualifications. CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst), ACCA, ACA, or CIMA in addition to the translator qualification. This is the marker that separates a competent linguist from a competent financial linguist. We staff CFA-qualified translators on prospectus and equity research work; ACCA on annual report and audit work.
3. Buy-side or audit-house experience. A translator who spent five years on a French equity desk or in a Big Four audit team has internalised the register in a way a textbook cannot teach. We weight this heavily for high-stakes documents.
4. Active translation memory ownership. A translator who has built a personal TM of 200,000+ financial segments over 10 years brings consistency that a freelancer pool cannot match.

For any project over £5,000, we publish the linguist credentials in the scope document — name (or initials with NDA cover), qualifications, years in the specialism, and the languages they cover. You see who is touching your prospectus before we start work. No anonymous freelancer pool.

Every financial translation goes through a second financial linguist for review (ISO 17100 requirement). For regulated documents we add a third pass by a UK-qualified accountant or chartered tax adviser to verify any jurisdiction-specific terminology before delivery.

Before final delivery, a second financial linguist performs a "numbers-only" pass. The reviewer ignores the prose and checks every number, every currency symbol, every percentage, every basis-point reference against the source. Any discrepancy is flagged for the primary translator to resolve. This is not the same as the linguistic review — it is a separate, targeted pass that takes 15-20% of the total project time.

For the highest-stakes regulatory text — auditor opinion, risk factors in a prospectus, mandatory disclosures in a fund KID — we offer back-translation. A third linguist who has never seen the source document translates the target back into the source language; the result is compared with the original. Discrepancies are reconciled before delivery. This is best practice for regulated content where a mistranslation could trigger a regulatory query.

• French: non-breaking space as thousands separator (1 234,56 €). Decimal comma. Currency after the amount.
• German: dot as thousands separator, comma as decimal (1.234,56 €). Currency after.
• Spanish (ES): dot as thousands, comma as decimal. Currency after.
• Indian English: lakh and crore conventions (1,23,45,678). Often missed by Western translators.
• Arabic: Arabic-Indic digits (١٢٣٤٫٥٦) or Western digits depending on house style. We confirm before commencing.

• LingoSecure portal. Our own translation workspace. AES-256 encryption at rest, TLS 1.3 in transit. No files on freelancer laptops — translators work in the browser, against the file held in the portal.
• Per-user audit log. Every action — file view, file download, segment edit, comment — is logged with user, timestamp, and IP. The log is exportable for compliance review.
• IP allowlisting. On request, project access is restricted to specific IP ranges (your office, your VPN). Used by funds and audit teams with strict data-room policies.
• Optional BYOK. For enterprise clients with regulatory data-handling requirements, we support bring-your-own-key encryption — your KMS holds the keys, we cannot access content without them.
• Document destruction. On project close, source and target files are deleted from the portal on a defined retention schedule (default 90 days; configurable per project to 30 or 365). TM is retained in your account; raw files are not.

• DPA (Data Processing Agreement) executed before any file upload. We sign yours or provide our standard (GDPR Article 28-compliant).
• NDA at company level and at translator level. Translators sign a project-specific NDA for sensitive projects in addition to their employment NDA.
• ISO 17100 accreditation covers the translation process; ISO 27001-aligned controls cover the data handling. Audit evidence available on request.
• UK-based. Cardiff HQ. UK law applies; UK Information Commissioner is the regulator. No data leaves the UK without your written consent (and we do not subcontract Arabic — see our software localisation page for the in-house rationale).

For listed clients we agree a capacity reservation in November for the following February's results season. Linguists are blocked out, glossaries are refreshed against the latest filings, and a contingency translator is identified per language in case of illness. We do not gamble on freelancer availability the week your results land.

• Annual report (40-80 pages, financial section). Standard 7-10 working days; expedited 4-5 working days at premium rate; rush (2-3 working days) by exception and with prior capacity reservation.
• Half-year results / quarterly statement. Standard 3-5 working days; expedited 1-2 working days.
• Fund KID (PRIIPs). 24-48 hours per language for a standard 3-page document.
• Press release (results day). 4-hour turnaround possible for short releases (under 1,000 words) with prior reservation.
• Investor presentation deck. 2-3 working days for a 30-40 slide deck; expedited overnight where critical.

Most ongoing financial clients move to a framework agreement after the first results cycle. The framework fixes rates, reserves capacity for known reporting dates, and removes the per-project negotiation cycle. We work to framework agreements with several UK public-sector and major enterprise clients; the procurement template is on file.