By now the story is well known across the investing world. This week, Japanese conglomerate Sony saw a blip of news drive shares higher and then ultimately vanish. Even to a novice investor this scenario is nothing new or unexpected. Shares and, indeed, entire markets can move on speculation. What makes this move different is because it was caused by a translation error in one of the Japanese stock market’s news sources.
The story itself – originally in Japanese – stated that Sony had been looking at a proposal from the manager of a hedge fund, Daniel Loeb, to spin off Sony’s entertainment division. However, due to the mistranslation of several words, the proposal that Sony “had been looking at” was translated into English as “leaning towards.” For conversational translation, the difference here is minimal, but for information-hungry investors who parse out statements based on vocabulary and word usage, the difference in massive. Naturally, while the obvious message to take from this story is the need for proper translation and translation oversight, it is important to look at it within the context of investing.
Another example of mistranslation were the efforts of a team of translators preparing the EU documentation in English into German in preparation of a vote in the German parliament for ratification. This stated that the finance requirements were EUR 100 million, not the actual level of EUR 100 billion. This was corrected in session, but caused some hilarity in German national newspapers.
Investing is neither a club only for the wealthy nor something that only involves familiar, local businesses. More than 2/3 of all Americans are now connected to the stock market either directly or indirectly, and with the click of a mouse, a person can invest in companies from all over the globe. However, with this development the desire and hunger for information has massively increased, meaning that few (if any) large, global companies can actually afford to release information in only one language anymore. For example, more than 50% of the ownership of the DAX, the leading stock index in Germany, is internationally held.
As the need for and use of translation services increases, so does the probability of mistakes being made. Thankfully, most of these potential mistakes are basic, such as grammatical or minor syntactical errors, which generally cannot cause too many problems. However, these translation mistakes, as this recent Sony mistranslation incident has demonstrated can move the market.
How can events like this be prevented in the future?
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In order to correctly convey the sentiment of the story, beyond just reporting on and translating the news, organizations must pay greater heed to the context of the news.
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Companies must aggressively expand their translated offerings, like annual reports and press releases, so that they can control the flow of information and prevent informational wiggle room in third-party sources.
- In all probability the mistake regarding Sony was made by someone who does not understand the nuances of financial market communication. One way of preventing any recurrence of this is to mandate a quality translation company with experience and expertise in dealing with business and investor translations.
Are you looking for quality financial translations in the areas of investor relations? EVS Translations is an international translation company specializing in document translations for these areas.
