Translate an audit report into Simplified Chinese

What Chinese changes in an audit report

An audit report hinges on a handful of fixed formulas. Each type of opinion has an established Chinese wording: 无保留意见 (unmodified opinion), 保留意见 (qualified opinion), 否定意见 (adverse opinion) and 无法表示意见 (disclaimer of opinion). Key audit matters become 关键审计事项, a finding 审计发现, a recommendation 建议 and the management response 管理层回应. These are the passages to read first.

Chinese has no grammatical plural, only the single category other. Quantity is expressed through a measure word: ‘three significant findings’ is 三项重大发现, with 项 for items in a list. Awkward auto-generated strings such as ‘1 finding(s)’ simply have no equivalent.

The expected register is formal written Chinese (书面语), impersonal and restrained. Punctuation is full-width (，。：；（）), while acronyms such as IFRS, COSO or ERP stay in Latin script, as do finding reference numbers like F-2024-07.

Figures, dates and amounts: the Chinese-specific traps

The figures in an audit report must not move, but their notation does:

• Separators: if your source uses a decimal comma (French, German, Spanish), 1.234.567,89 must become 1,234,567.89; a mishandled separator shifts an amount by a factor of a thousand.
• Dates: ‘31 December 2024’ is written 2024年12月31日, notably for the period end and the report signature date.
• Large numbers in running text: Chinese counts in tens of thousands. ‘EUR 1.5 million’ often reads 150万欧元 and ‘2 billion’ 20亿. Tables usually keep Arabic numerals with a unit in the header, such as 单位：千欧元.
• Percentages: written without a space, 12.5%.
• Currency: amounts in euros or pounds stay in that currency; translation does not convert to renminbi.

Negative amounts in brackets, such as (45.2), are understood in Chinese, but check they survived any separator conversion.

What Manuce delivers, and what it does not

At the Professional level the report is translated by Métis, Manuce's finance specialist, and comes back in the same format: Word stays Word, PDF stays PDF, an Excel findings log stays Excel. For a typical document such as a report of around 6,000 words (about 20 pages), the translation is delivered within minutes and kept in your client area. Chinese carries a surcharge: a ×1.6 coefficient on the per-word rate.

The target is Simplified Chinese (mainland China, Singapore). For readers in Taiwan or Hong Kong, choose Traditional Chinese, which Manuce treats as a separate language.

What Manuce does not do:

• no sworn or certified translation: if a regulator or bank requires one from an accredited translator, you will need another provider;
• the translation does not reproduce the audit firm's signature or seal, which remain those of the original report;
• scanned PDFs without selectable text are not read;
• Manuce does not review the substance of the audit or check the figures;
• no glossary or terminology instructions are accepted: check any term you want kept as is in the free extract, then in the full translation.

Preparing the file and checking the Chinese version

Before uploading:

• use the source Word or Excel file rather than an exported PDF where possible: tables and risk matrices rebuild more cleanly;
• a Latin-only font (Calibri, Arial, Garamond) has no Chinese characters; whoever opens the file needs a font covering Chinese, such as SimSun, Microsoft YaHei or Noto Sans CJK;
• replace tables pasted as images with real tables, otherwise their text stays untranslated.

After delivery:

• read the opinion and key audit matters in full;
• check entity names: a company with an official registered Chinese name (法定中文名称) should appear under that name, not a transliteration;
• check rating scales: ‘high / medium / low’ should give 高 / 中 / 低 consistently throughout;
• look at narrow cells: Chinese is two to three times shorter in characters, but each character is wider, so the space taken barely changes, and a line break can fall in the middle of a term.

In practice

1. Export the report as Word, Excel or text-based PDF (not a scan).
2. Upload it, select Simplified Chinese and read the quote based on the exact word count.
3. Check the free extract, ideally on the opinion paragraph.
4. After payment, download the translated file and check amounts, dates and entity names.