Chinese Company Accounts Translation for UK Banks and Companies House

For an overseas-company filing, Companies House requires a true and accurate translation authenticated by an appropriate person, such as a director or company secretary, who signs at the end. I provide the translation; your company officer certifies it for filing. My translator certification does not replace that officer’s authentication. Check the overseas-company guidance for the relevant filing and authorised roles. A bank may set a different document checklist.

A full Chinese reporting package is more than a balance sheet. What normally lands in my inbox is some combination of:

• 资产负债表 — the balance sheet, laid out with 年初余额 and 期末余额 columns rather than the prior-year/current-year presentation a UK reader expects.
• 利润表 (also 损益表) — the income statement, typically showing 本期金额 against 上期金额.
• 现金流量表 — the cash flow statement, split into operating, investing and financing activities.
• 所有者权益变动表 — the statement of changes in owners’ equity, often the widest and most awkward table in the set.
• 财务报表附注 — the notes, which are usually the longest part by word count and the part clients most often forget to send.
• 审计报告 — the auditor’s report, if the accounts were audited.

The audit report carries its own apparatus: the 会计师事务所 letterhead, the opinion paragraph, two 注册会计师 signatures with their CPA practising certificate numbers, the firm’s business licence number, the firm’s round seal, and a date. The statements themselves are commonly stamped with the company 公章 and a 财务专用章, and signed by the 法定代表人, the person in charge of accounting and the chief accountant. All of that gets rendered and described in position, because a due-diligence reader treats an unsigned or unsealed set very differently from a sealed one.

Two things cause more trouble in these files than anything else. The first is units. A Chinese table headed 单位：元 means the figures are in yuan; 单位：万元 means they are in units of ten thousand yuan, so 1,250.00 is twelve and a half million. I carry the unit note across prominently and I do not silently multiply the figures out, because restating numbers is not translating them. The second is chart-of-accounts vocabulary that has no clean UK equivalent, because Chinese statutory accounts follow the Accounting Standards for Business Enterprises rather than UK GAAP or IFRS. Captions such as 实收资本, 资本公积, 盈余公积, 未分配利润, 其他应收款 and 应付职工薪酬 are translated as what they say, with the Chinese retained where it helps a reader match a line item back to the original, and never recharacterised into a UK caption that carries different meaning. I also check that subtotals and cross-footing in the English tie to the original, that 期初/期末 columns are not transposed, and that the company name is spelled the way it appears on your UK-facing paperwork.

Send the complete PDF, including the notes and any auditor’s report, and tell me three things: whether the accounts are audited, which company name spelling you use in the UK, and who is going to read the translation. If only part of the package is needed — some banks want the balance sheet and income statement only — say so and I will quote on that subset rather than the whole file. I will come back with a page count, a price and a delivery time before any work starts, and revisions are included if your accountant wants a caption worded differently once they have read it.