Translating Confidential Information: our experience

Have you ever wondered how big multinationals translate all their quarterly or annual reports into different languages at the same time?

It’s an interesting topic given the delicate nature of the subject matter and the different ways of approaching it.

• To start with, when talking about business figures or any other financial details, companies wait until the very last moment to publish their reports. The very nature of these documents means they are extremely urgent.
• Second, any leak, whether deliberate or accidental, will have an impact on the market, which means that anyone with access to the report before its official publication has to maintain the highest levels of confidentiality. Otherwise, the company’s reputation and financial standing could be at risk, with potential legal repercussions.

In our case, we have been handling the quarterly and annual reports for one of our clients for over 8 years, translating them into 21 different languages. This company is one of the most important in the world, with a presence in over 100 countries and over 5 million daily clients.

We always receive the report at the end of the day before publication. At this time, our team of collaborators around the world are waiting for the report to be sent, so they can translate the content and have it ready for the next day. It is important to work with collaborators in different time zones to make the most of the opportunity to work around the clock.. This is one of the advantages of having collaborators in every corner of the globe!

As you will have read in our previous article, we can assign tasks to a predefined group of collaborators depending on their experience with the client or topic. This means we already know they are trusted collaborators who are well suited for the job.

A large percentage of this content is similar to previous years, and this means we can prepare a preliminary version while waiting for the new figures and content, meaning we can get ahead in terms of speed and consistency in comparison to previous years or quarters.

And what about the figures? For Asian languages, and even languages like Turkish, for example, the way numbers are written tends to differ from European languages, and it is not enough just to change commas to full stops, like from Spanish to English.

The final version of the document is ready at 9 am. The work rhythm is intense, given that it tends to be very important content including information that cannot be shared until minutes before publication. Despite all this, we adapt our processes to this case in particular, and we are aware the margin for error is very small.