The IFRS Foundation has translated some of its documents into both French and Japanese.
A French version of the 2014 unaccompanied standards has now been made available on the website, while two exposure drafts – Recognition of Deferred Tax Assets for Unrealised Losses, and Measuring Quoted Investments in Subsidiaries, Joint Ventures and Associates at Fair Value – have been released in Japanese.
It is the latest stage of the foundation's attempts to make sure that important information is made available in a host of languages. Considering that only six per cent of the world are native English speakers, this certainly makes business sense.
For example, the body's Red Book can be accessed in Uzbek, Armenian, French, Russian and Spanish. All of these translations are subject to a review by a committee of technical accounting experts, which is lucky, as we've already established how tricky Japanese can be to translate.
As the IFRS points out, translation is an essential tool when trying to speak to different audiences across the world. This means the body's aim – which is to create high-quality global accounting standards – is not possible without reproducing its content in a number of languages.
"Countries adopting or permitting the use of international financial reporting standards (IFRSs) will only be able to benefit from the comparability and transparency that the use of IFRSs provides if the IFRSs are rendered accurately and completely into each language," the foundation stated.
As you're probably aware by now, we're pretty big fans of translation. When it comes to being able to translate into other languages, the more the better as far as we're concerned.
That's why we're glad to see global bodies such as the IFRS Foundation recognize just how important the process is, as it really can be the difference between long-term success and failure.
