Language and Translation in Accounting: Special issue call for papers from the Accounting,Auditing & Accountability Journal

About the special issue

Translation is a vital part of achieving the IFRS Foundation’s mission to develop a single set of high-quality global accounting standards for use around the world. (IASB website)

… translation is a highly manipulative activity that involves all kind of stages in that process of transfer across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Translation is not an innocent, transparent activity but it is highly charged with significance at every stage; it rarely, if ever, involves a relationship of equality between texts, authors or systems. (Bassnett and Trivedi, 2012: 2)

Translation – across languages and cultures – plays a critical role in accounting. It is required in international trade, in operating and accounting for multinational enterprises, in creating, implementing and enforcing international accounting laws and standards, in delivering accounting education to international cohorts of students, and in conducting international and intercultural research. Financial statements and annual reports, standards and standard-setting discourse, teaching materials and publication of research findings all require translation for at least some constituents. Accounting research explores annual report narratives or regulatory discourse, employs content analysis or disclosure indices, conducts interview, experimental and survey research, and draws on theoretical frameworks, all often across cultural and language boundaries.

However, exact equivalence in translation is rare; there is no one-to-one semantic correspondence of concepts between different language-cultures (Catford, 1965; Venuti, 1995). This is especially the case when a subject or discipline – such as accounting – is culture-specific, socially constructed, inherently indeterminate or ideological (Evans, 2004; Evans et al., 2015). It cannot be assumed, therefore, that ‘all ways of viewing the social world can be straightforwardly captured using the English language’ (Temple, 2013: 100), nor that an objective reality can be obtained by translation (Xian, 2008). Instead, translation is implicated in uneven power relationships (Bassnett and Trivedi, 2013: 3; Simon, 1997). In spite of this, with few exceptions, accounting largely appears to neglect translation – both as a research opportunity and as a methodological and epistemological consideration. This is in contrast to the ‘translation turn’ in other disciplines. However, research on language use and translation in accounting has the potential to have real-world impact – for example, the IFRS Foundation has recently called for research on language and cultural influences on the international application of its standards. Finally, engagement with translation does not have to be limited to inter-lingual translation, but can include all aspects of translation – in the wider sense – across cultures and disciplines.

This AAAJ special issue intends to open up the opportunity to explore these interrelationships and aims to encourage research that develops diverse and multicultural approaches to accounting thought. We encourage submissions that address topics relating to language, culture and translation in accounting, auditing and accountability. Possible topics may include, but are not restricted to:

Submitting to the issue

Initial submission deadline: 30 June 2017. The link for submissions will open in early 2017. Manuscripts should be submitted electronically. Author guidelines must be followed. For further information please contact the guest editors: Lisa Evans, Stirling University: lisa.evans@stir.ac.uk or Rania Kamla, Heriot Watt University: r.kamla@hw.ac.uk.