Financial reporting

L’importance relative is the threshold below which a misstatement is left where it is, and English calls it « materiality », a word from an entirely different root. The reason the French term is not « relative importance » is that l’importance does a job « importance » in English gave up. In English the noun is about mattering: a thing has importance or it has none, and the word carries a judgement. French keeps that, but it also uses the same noun for size, extent, magnitude, with no judgement attached at all. L’importance des dégâts is how much damage there is. Une somme d’une certaine importance is a sizeable sum. Un bâtiment de faible importance is a small building, and selon l’importance de l’entreprise means according to how big the company is. Once that second sense is in view, l’importance relative reads correctly at once: not how much a figure matters in the abstract, but how big it is beside the rest of the accounts. The adjective is doing the comparing and the noun is doing the measuring — which is exactly what a materiality threshold is for.