IFRS - 7 Languages General Purpose XBRL Taxonomy

Search the IFRS XBRL Taxonomy

XBRL – eXtensible Business Reporting Language – is a language for the electronic communication of business and financial data which is revolutionising business reporting around the world. More than 255,000 words in 7 languages. It is worth a search, isn'it?

At present this glossary is available only from English into French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German and Dutch, but not the other way round. You can even search the site in the field above. Soon it will be possible to browse it alphabetically for all of these linguistic pairs, and also to choose up to three languages together for visualizing trilingual results. Stay tuned!

Disclaimer: more than two years ago, I started to translate several XBRL taxonomies but I discovered afterwards this clause of the IASC Foundation XBRL IP Policy:

1.9

Translation of any of the material contained herein into any other language is prohibited without the prior permission of the IASC Foundation. If you wish to translate the taxonomy please contact the IASC Foundation.

Such an interdiction is quite hard for a translator but I stopped my intent to publish my work and wait for the official translations, which aim to:

make the IFRS-GP freely available in multiple languages from the centralised location of this website;
ensure the taxonomy translations reflect accurately the official translations of the IFRSs;
ensure the translations are of a high quality and,
attempt to address liability issues of translators and reviewers.

At the beginning of this year (January 2007), the Status and Downloads by Language were as follow:

Dutch (Draft version), French (Final version), German (Draft version), Italian (2005 Translation completed), Portuguese (Draft version) and Spanish (Final version). Except for the Italian version (published on 2005-05-15), all others have been released on 2006-08-15. I've counted 126 items not yet translated in the Italian version (where the official translation is not available, items are marked "N.A." in the present work), but 4,123 translated for a total of 4,249 items by language. Do the maths and it remains 29,617 items, +255,000 words, with an average of 8,61 words by item!

1. IFRS GP-Taxonomy License

(...)

1.3

This policy permits you to make use of the Taxonomy in the following manner:

(a)	use in the creation of XBRL instances.
(b)	use as a basis for the creation of other XBRL compliant taxonomies.
(c)	distribute non-commercially.

1.4

To enable you to use the material for the purposes intended in clause 1.3 you are permitted subject to the limitations of this policy to:

(a)

use, reformat, store, and back-up the Data that comprises the Taxonomies and related material, including the conversion of the Data into hard copy from Electronic Format.

(b)

amend the material to create additional or extension taxonomies.

(c)

map to instances.

(d)

make the Taxonomy publicly available provided you do not receive payment for doing so. This includes bundling it for free in commercial software distributions.

(i)	You will not alter or amend the materials that you make publicly available under the provisions of this clause.
(ii)	You will acknowledge the IASC Foundation’s rights in the material in accordance with Para. 1.6 below.

1.5

You may exercise the rights set out in clause 1.4 solely to further the purposes set out in clause 1.3(a) to (c).

1.6

Any copies of the material or extracts thereof reproduced under the permissions granted by this policy shall be accompanied by an acknowledgement in the form: © International Accounting Standards Committee Foundation, used with permission.

XBRL INTERNATIONAL INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY POLICY (“IP Policy”)

Extract: "This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are included on all such copies and derivative works. However, this document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing the copyright notice or references to XBRL International or XBRL organizations, except as required to translate it into languages other than English. Members of XBRL International agree to grant certain licenses under the XBRL International Intellectual Property Policy (www.xbrl.org/legal)."