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Reading Ease of Bilingual Annual Reports

City University of Hong Kong

Salleh Hassan

Nottingham University Business School-Malaysian Campus

This is the first bilingual readability study reporting on different lan guage versions of narrative disclosures within corporate annual reports. Specifically, the study examines reading ease between the Eng lish and Chinese versions of 65 corporate annual reports in Hong Kong and the English and Malay versions of 53 annual reports in Malaysia. The same passages from the Chairman's Address in both languages were scored using Flesch and Yang formulas for Hong Kong and Flesch and Yunus formulas for Malaysia. Results provide some tentative impression that the indigenous language version is easier to read than the English-written counterparts. In addition, evidence sug gested that the English passages in Malaysian annual reports are easier to read than the English passages in Hong Kong annual reports. Taken overall, the results suggest that different language ver sions could produce different reading behaviour and may have resource allocation decision-making implications.

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