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QUICK GUIDE Working with currency, number and date formats
When translating financial texts – and often when working with legal and commercial texts – currency symbols and number separators are something you can easily trip up on. Get these wrong, and you could be skewing your figures by orders of magnitude. In this quick guide, we’ll take you through the key things you need to know
about working with number and date Image: Annie Spratt/Unsplash formats across different locales.
1 Points to consider
The main things to bear in mind when Currency symbols working with numbers across locales For many currencies, two parallel sets of are the following: symbols exist: the customary ones used within a nation and the ISO 4217 currency code (see Currency symbols right). The exact usage and placement of these Decimal separators symbols varies by locale. Thousand separators Consideration should be given to whether Date formats the customary symbols are clear and unambiguous in an international context. For We use the term ‘locales’ as there can financial texts, it’s best to err on the side of sometimes be variations from country caution and clarity and use the ISO 4217 code. to country within the same language. This is most visible in date formats, Currency Customary ISO 4217 which vary between the US and the rest symbol code of the world, and can often be a point of British pound £ GBP confusion. Euro € EUR US dollar $, US$ USD Canadian dollar $, CA$, Can$, C$ CAN Danish krone kr. DKK In many non-English speaking Icelandic króna kr. ISK European countries, the Norwegian krone kr. NOK customary currency symbol Swedish krona kr. SEK follows the amount, and is preceded by a space, whereas Japanese yen ¥ JPY in English there is usually no Chinese yuan ¥, 元 CNY space and the symbol for the main unit comes before the amount.
Customary symbol placement £1,674.80 1 674,80 € United Kingdom Rest of Europe
2 Decimal separators The decimal separator or radix character is Names for big numbers the symbol used to separate integers from English stands out from many other fractional numbers. European languages in the names it uses for larger numbers. Historically in UK English, a billion was known as a milliard, a trillion was a billion and so on. Now 27.25 27∙25 UK usage has aligned with US usage, English-speaking countries, English-speaking countries but other European languages retain the Mexico, Japan, China (older) word milliard and start counting billions once another thousand is added. In handwriting and older print, an interpunct is used in many 27,25 English-speaking countries Number English Danish/ Francophone Canada, most other countries for clarity, as the point would Norwegian sometimes not be visible if written on a line, although this 1,000,000 million million usage has fallen out of favour since the advent of computing. 1,000,000,000 billion milliard 1,000,000,000,000 trillion billion
Thousands separators The thousands separator or delimiter allows India In India and surrounding countries, the for rapid reading of longer numbers. Some terms lakh (100,000) and crore (1,000,000) 5,00,000 500,000 countries use alternative grouping systems. are the most common terms for expressing five lakh five hundred thousand large numbers. This affects digit separation, so instead of grouping all large numbers by 12,12,12,123 121,212,123 three digits, only the rightmost three digits twelve crore, twelve one hundred and twenty- are kept together and the remaining digits lakh, twelve thousand, one million, two hundred 7,468,692 7.468.692 are grouped in twos to enable the number one hundred and and twelve thousand, English-speaking countries, Denmark, Iceland, Germany, to be read in lakh and crore. Mexico, Japan, China Spanish-speaking countries twenty-three one hundred and twenty-three
Indian system Western system 7 568 692 7’568’692 China Finland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Liechtenstein There is no standardised digit grouping Central and Eastern Europe, system in China. Traditional systems based French-speaking counrtres on multiples of 10,000 are used, along with the Western system of separating by thousands with commas or spaces. 3 Dates and times Date formats vary widely by locale and context. They also have high potential for generating misunderstanding if overlooked.
Time Date In the US and Canada, 12-hour clock is the In the US and Canada, the month normally In many European most common time format. In the rest of precedes the date in both long and short languages, days the world, 24-hour clock prevails. When forms. When the short form is used, this and months are 12-hour clock is used in the UK, the am or often creates an ambiguous situation. To not capitalised. pm is usually written in lower case, without avoid this, use the long form or the ISO full stops. 8601 standard (YYYY-MM-DD).
3:25 P.M. 15h25 Short form 10/4/2020 04/10/2020 04/10/2020 United States, Canada French-speaking countries Long form Sunday, October 4, 2020 Sunday, 4 October 2020 dimanche le 4 octobre 2020 3:25pm 15:25 United Kingdom Rest of world Pronunciation Sunday October fourth Sunday the fourth of dimanche le quatre two thousand twenty October two thousand octobre deux mille vingt and twenty US, Anglophone Canada Other English-speaking countries French-speaking countries A tale of two standards The linguistic situation in Canada is unique and poses some particular problems for expressing the date. 04.10.2020 2020年10月04日 The country is officially bilingual, with English and French both recognised at federal level. French- sondag (den) 4. oktober 2020年10月04日 星期日 In China, the date speaking Canada follows standard French date and 2020 is generally read time notation, with the day coming before the month. as single digits However, in English-speaking Canada, a mixture of sondag den fjorde oktober èrlíngèrlíng nián shí yuè followed by the British and American notations is used, commonly to tusind og tyve sei rì xīngqīrì words for year, causing confusion between the day and the month, month and day, respectively. The for example 04/10/2020 could be read as either 4 Denmark China (Mandarin) pronunciation October or 10 April 2020. Because of this, the Canadian translates as ‘two government now recommends using the ISO 8601 zero two zero year, standard, which would render this date as 2020-10-04. ten month, four day, Sunday’.
4 Format map English-speaking Canada Here you can see the formats for the main locales we translate from and into. United States
Greenland French-speaking (DK) Canada
Iceland
Finland
Country Currency ISO 4217 code Norway
Canada Canadian dollar CAD Sweden Denmark Danish krone DKK Faroe Islands Danish krone* DKK Denmark Éire Finland Euro EUR France Euro EUR UK Germany Germany Euro EUR Key Greenland Danish krone DKK Iceland Icelandic króna ISK France Decimals separated with dot Ireland (Éire) Euro EUR Norway Norwegian krone NOR Decimals separated with comma Sweden Swedish krona SWE United Kingdom Pound sterling** GBP Thousands separated with comma United States US dollar USD Thousands separated with dot * The Faroe Islands issues its own banknotes as the Faroese króna, but these are interchangeable with Danish notes. Thousands separated with space ** Scotland and Northern Ireland issue their own banknotes, but these are interchangeable with English notes. Currency symbol before amount
Currency symbol after amount 5