Financial translation, a neglected field: The case of the Key Investor Information document

Abstract

By looking at the Key Investor Information document (KIID), the present article shows how the area of finance is still considerably unexplored in Translation Studies, despite the increased interest that economic and financial texts have attracted among translation scholars in the last decade. The article describes the KIID and its background and then focuses on its relevance to Translation Studies, as well as to translation practice and, more generally, to society. Never before examined within Translation Studies, the KIID is a mandatory regulatory document aimed at retail investors, and its underlying financial product increases financing opportunities for companies, especially when crossing international borders, where the document’s translation into the target country’s language is compulsory. The KIID has very specific characteristics that make it a financial genre in its own right, due to grow in importance because of several factors. In the article, its main characteristics are presented and discussed from a Translation Studies perspective, on the basis of both the regulations that gave rise to it and a parallel and comparable corpus study.