General Rules

An annual report contains a company’s achievements and financial figures and is provided to shareholders, stakeholders and potential investors. The report uses several styles of writing: descriptive, corporate, advertising, financial, and legal. Previous reports are good benchmarks. Research is key to successfully translate an annual report. Search not only on client’s website but also on other related websites for benchmarking purposes.

Try to find sources in written in the target language, not translations of local corporations. Internet is full of misleading bits of information. You need to learn how to navigate among the clutter.

Annual reports often require a transcreation approach, too. Dragoman calls this “Gold” level and we provide training for our colleagues.

Follow the “AP Stylebook” and “Dragoman Style Guide for Figures” for all numerals. Remember that Turkish way of writing numbers is different and you need to update all figures according to our style – not according to source text or just the way you like it.

Follow the “AP Stylebook” for U.S. rules of capitalization and punctuation.

For translating awards and projects, follow the “Dragoman Style Guide for Magazines and Journals.”

Review the company’s website and previous annual reports for the following:

  • Names of products, brands, and services; key personnel, i.e., CEO, directors, managers;
  • Industry, business activities, locations, subsidiaries (if any), affiliations; and
  • Awards, standardization certificates, and corporate social responsibility projects.

Use consistent terms for the following:

  • The company’s various departments, divisions, directorates, sections or units; Turkish agencies, laws, state departments, NGOs, and other institutions; and
  • Company annual shareholders meetings as follows:
    • Use Ordinary General Shareholders Assembly or use Ordinary General Shareholders Meeting (do not use both and do not use “assembly meeting”)
    • Use “Extraordinary” for additional shareholders assemblies held during the year as in Extraordinary General Shareholders Assembly (or meeting)

Financial Jargon. Use Dragoman Nubuto’s internal termbase and concordance for terms. Other helpful links: www.investopedia.com; www.investorwords.com; www.businessdictionary.com

Word Choices: Use synonyms, adverbs and adjectives to describe figures and events.

  • Alternate repetitive use of increase/decrease with climb, rise, fell, drop, soar, and so on.
  • Use phrases like showed a downtrend or uptrend; outperformed our targets; improved our market share; upgraded our IT systems; dramatically fell; dropped considerably; climbed even higher, and so on.