Find Out the Secret Behind “One And Seven” Financial translation is one of the most important tasks you’ll undertake as a business professional. If you do any kind of international business, you’ll have to translate documents that deal with units, conversion, price, and a host of other numbers.
Lost in Translation: Numbers
Trying to complete these translations on your own is not advisable since translation requires an intimate knowledge both of your target language and the cultural and financial customs that exist in the country with which you’re doing business.
Twenty-four o 24?
However, it’s not just the words themselves that need translating, it’s the numbers within the document. You might think you could just use numeric figures (i.e. 10, 24, 300). However, there are some instances in which it’s legally required to write out the numbers using words to help eliminate any possible misinterpretations (i.e. ten, twenty-four, three hundred).
Is “Seventeen” in Spanish “ten and seven”?
Let’s take Spanish as an example. If you didn’t know that the number seventeen in Spanish literally translated as “ten and seven” in English, you might be tempted to call it “uno siete”. After all, it’s written as “one-seven”, so why wouldn’t it be translated that way? The reason you wouldn’t translate seventeen as one-seven is because it’s actually a ten and a seven. “One seven” means as little in Spanish as it does in English.
For that reason, you have to say “diez y siete”, or ten and seven, when translating that number. Visit our blog.
Lost in Translation: How We Can Help
This is just one example of how important it is to have an intimate knowledge of the language into which you’re translating your financial documents. Getting lost in translation can happen with numbers just as much as it can with letters. We can help you by accessing our extensive network of financial and linguistic professional translators.
SemioticTransfer network consists of native experts who have first-hand experience of both the financial sector and the linguistic nuances that make each language so unique.
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