Financial reporting

The thirtieth entry is fora do balanço, and it is the one line on this page whose English rendering is settled by punctuation rather than by vocabulary. The phrase is « off balance sheet », and two things go wrong with it. The first is that « off balance » already means something else: unsteady, on the point of falling — « he was knocked off balance », « the question threw her off balance ». Drop the third word and the sentence has changed subject altogether. The second is the hyphen. English writes a multi-word modifier with hyphens when it stands in front of the noun it qualifies, and leaves them out when it follows the verb. So one writes « off-balance-sheet financing » and « the off-balance-sheet items », but « the guarantee is kept off balance sheet ». The same rule governs half this list: « related-party transactions » beside « transactions with related parties », « fair-value measurement » beside « measured at fair value », « a going-concern assumption » beside « the accounts assume a going concern ». Portuguese needs none of it, because fora do balanço keeps its preposition in both positions. The hyphens are not decoration: they say where the compound begins and where it ends.