Bilingual legends without a second, late file
19 May 2026 · Tamar Gelashvili
Shareholders who read English should not receive a translation that is a version behind. The rate date belongs in the source line, not in an email after the sitting.
The old habit in some Tbilisi holdings was a Georgian pack for the room and an English file emailed on Friday. The English file was always late, and the sterling column used a rate someone picked in a hurry.
We set both languages on the same chart. It makes the page denser. It also means there is only one document to print. Labels are written so that Georgian does not look like a caption under an English title, and the other way around. That is a typesetting job, not a translation job dumped on the intern the night before.
When a second currency sits beside GEL, the source line names the rate and the date. If the shareholders expect the NBG reference, we put that reference, not a round number from memory. If they expect a group rate from the parent, we put that, and we write whose workbook it lives in.
The work that takes time is not the drawing. It is agreeing, in the discovery sitting, which words are allowed. “Margin” is not always the same word in both languages in every group. We write the pair down. The workshop we run for finance teams spends a surprising part of the morning on that list.
If your chair lives in Tbilisi and your shareholders do not, do not wait until the week of the sitting to decide this. Bring it to the first briefing. A cover that says “confidential” in both languages is enough decoration.