Context cultures, translation strategies and learning efficiency of accounting standards: experimental evidence based on ASBE and IFRS texts

Although the Chinese Accounting Standards for Business Enterprise (ASBE) has substantially converged with the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in content, it adopts a localized style in terms of structure and language characteristics. As such, it differs markedly from the IFRS in linguistics. Using context culture theory, we compare the ASBE’s high-context feature to the IFRS’s low-context feature. Using functional equivalence theory, we identify the ‘foreignizing’ feature of the Chinese IFRS and the ‘domesticating’ feature of the ASBE texts, from a translation perspective. We empirically study the learning efficiency of ASBE and Chinese IFRS, and find that the ASBE high-context culture is not conducive to solving accounting problems and a domesticating translation is helpful to improving the learning efficiency of accounting standards especially in complex task models. We further explore text completeness and readability as intermediary factors in how context culture and translation strategy influence learning efficiency.