Does anyone with Japanese accounting knowledge have any idea if there is an English equivalent word for 皆増 which appears on ledgers besides revenue increases where there was zero sales in previous year? Thank you in advance for any help.
The sentence is 三四社中プラスは二五社（うち二社皆増）、マイナス九社。
EDIT: the sentence is actually in a trade magazine. I think it was confusing to write the stuff about it appearing in ledgers but this is the info I gathered myself. It seems, based on comments, that I misunderstood that point and that it is a much more arbitrary usage.
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As a B4 accountant/professional translator, I’m going to assume I am one of the few (only?) people on this sub that even knows what you’re talking about/is weirdly qualified to answer, but before that I would really love to know why you’re asking this at 4:30AM. Also why here and not on a translator forum or proz.
Edit: why am I not surprised to see other accountants up early and finding the boring threads. well in that case I might as well just get to the point.
As noted, there are many terms across various industries that are uniquely convenient in Japanese but essentially are impossible to render with the same brevity in English – and usually the issue for the translator is space limitations in an Excel cell or a PPT diagram. English and accounting do have fun acronyms/industry lingo like SALY that work similarly, but definitely not to the extent of Japanese. Also, I would agree that in English we don’t really convey this concept on similar documents.
Getting to your specific question, I’d have to think very hard if I have ever seen a YOY change noted with a 皆増・減 in a set of TB or financials I’ve worked with (we’re talking in the thousands), so I am assuming by ledger you mean a non-accounting ledger. Basically, 皆増 or 皆減 are not “accounting” terms but more chart-making terms for Japanese-style charts (which we can put under “government accounting” if anything) that want to get the point across that this number was or will be 0.
So that leads to the conundrum every professional translator faces – how to handle something that doesn’t necessarily have a set standard for dealing with it. If I were treating this as a document I was translating, the first thing I’d usually do is ask the requester how they want this concept represented. For example, if it’s YOY % of change and there is space/freedom to modify the file, I could create my own acronym and then define it in a footnote/legend. Something like “DNEPY” for “did not exist prior year.” If the other items around it have numbers and this specific line doesn’t, I could drop an N/A or a – in it. If the requester really wants numbers, I could do a 0 or 100 to represent 0/100% growth.
As a real world example I just randomly googled in 10 seconds: https://www.mof.go.jp/english/policy/budget/budget/fy2021/01.pdf
https://www.mof.go.jp/policy/budget/budger_workflow/budget/fy2021/seifuan2021/03.pdf
You will see on page 6 they handle a 皆増 spot with “100%” in the English but a – in Japanese.
As another random example: https://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/oda/white/2003/part4_1.html
Here they use a more primitive “all increase” that we all know how they got to.
If you are doing this for work that’s related to some local government’s budgeting, I would do what I did and begin your search for real world examples of how the word has been approached by others before. This is fairly standard process for a translator.
TLDR: This is not necessarily an “accounting” term and rather one of those “can only pull off in Japanese due to two kanji getting an entire sentence’s meaning across” term. The above is an overly simplified summary of how I would have handled it as a professional translator. It’s 5AM so I will refrain from actually checking my 30GB Trados TM, which would only add more paragraphs to this already lengthy reply.
Are you working in accounting, and looking at a variance analysis?
I don’t think there is an English equivalent in accounting standards. I may be wrong but it is just for noting purposes.
– experience as japanese accountant both in japan and overseas
I’ve been doing accounting/audit in Japan for 10+ years but I’ve never encountered this term. Doing some googling I found it seems to be used mostly for local government financial reports. One such report gives the definition:
「皆増」・・前年度該当数字がなく、当年度から発生したときの増減率の増の表示
「皆減」・・前年度該当数字があり、当年度から発生しなくなったときの増減率の減の表示
It’s only used for tables with prior-period variances.
So to answer your question I would just translate 皆増 to NEW and 皆減 as DISC. short for discontinued.