Answering international investors in their own language

In short

A listed company’s shareholder base is international. Its investor communication usually is not. The reports are in English, sometimes also in the home-market language, and every investor whose first language is neither reads the equity story through a filter. This piece covers what that gap costs, why translating more documents never quite closes it, and how questions can now be answered in the investor’s own language while staying grounded in the company’s approved information.

Key facts

• Most listed companies publish in one or two languages, while their shareholders think in many more.

• Translation programmes cover documents, not questions. The report gets translated. The investor’s actual question does not.

• When investors research in their own language through general AI tools, the sourcing problem gets worse, because there is less local-language material about the company.

• Answering questions in the investor’s language, from the company’s original approved information, removes the filter without multiplying the document workload.

What does the language gap actually cost?

Distance, mostly, and it builds up quietly. An investor reading in their second language asks fewer questions, skims more and leans harder on intermediaries, such as local media, aggregators and commentary in their own language. So the version of your story they absorb is even more secondhand than usual.

Retail shareholders feel this most, but it reaches professionals too. A Nordic fund analyst reads your English report fine. Yet the follow-up question they would have dashed off in Swedish sometimes never gets written in English.

The cost rarely shows up as a complaint. It shows up as silence from parts of the register, and silence is easy to misread as satisfaction.

Why doesn’t translating more documents solve it?

Because documents are the supply side, and the gap is on the demand side. Translating an annual report into four languages is expensive and slow, and the result is out of date by the next release. Most companies rightly stop at one or two languages.

Even a fully translated library only answers the questions the documents happened to anticipate. The investor’s actual question, phrased their own way and in their own language, still has nowhere to go. And writing back in five languages is not something an IR inbox can staff.

So a documents-only approach leaves the company carrying a heavy translation cost. The investor still does their real thinking through whatever local-language material exists, and for most companies outside the largest caps, that material is thin.

What happens when investors ask AI in their own language?

The sourcing problem gets sharper. A general AI answering in Spanish or Finnish about a Dutch mid-cap draws on the material it can reach in and around that language. There is less of it, so aggregators and secondhand commentary carry more weight in the mix.

Where AI answers come from in general is covered in when investors ask an AI about your company. Language just narrows the source pool further. The investor gets a fluent answer in their own language that is even further removed from your own record than the English answer would have been.

How can a company answer in the investor’s language without multiplying the workload?

By separating the language of the answer from the language of the source. A source-grounded assistant answers investor questions using only the company’s approved company information. It can answer in many languages while the underlying documents stay in the language they were published in.

The investor asks in Swedish, and the answer comes back in Swedish. Every point still cites the original source document. What source-grounded means is explained in what is a source-grounded IR assistant. MIRA is such an assistant and answers in many languages.

Be clear about what this does and does not change. It does not translate your official company information. The authoritative documents stay exactly as published and approved. What changes is the conversation. The question and the answer happen in the investor’s language, the evidence stays in yours, and the citation connects the two. Translation cost stops growing with the number of languages, because nothing new gets published per language.

The bottom line

International shareholders read an English-only equity story through a filter. Translating more documents is a slow, expensive way to close a gap that sits in the questions, not in the documents. Answer investor questions in the investor’s own language, grounded in the company’s original approved information with a citation for each point. That removes the filter in the conversation itself, while the official record stays untouched. The companies with the most international registers have the most to gain.

Want to see your own published information answer in another language? Book a MIRA demo and ask a question in the language your investors use.

About the author: Sander van Prooijen is Head of Commercial Strategy at Finvictum, where he leads the European rollout of MIRA. He works with IR teams across Europe on how investors, and more and more AI tools, find and read the equity story. Connect on LinkedIn.