Abstract:
ABSTRACT
The necessity of tight cooperation between banking institutions and linguists has intensified
considering the changes the banking industry has undergone in recent years, both domestically
and internationally.
This study was intended to investigate customer‘s perceptions on the prominence of English in
bank documents, and to bridge the communication gap that exists between the banks and
customers by creating a trilingual glossary of basic terms (English-French-Kinyarwanda). This
study relied on different quantitative and qualitative research techniques including questionnaires
addressed to both, bank clients and bank personnel, looking at bank communication panels and
write down key terms, documentation and exploiting publications of different scholars related to
the topic, as well as interviews, which enabled the researcher to create a corpus of 250 basic
terms related to banks and mostly needed by bank customers.
The use of translation techniques consisting of equivalence, borrowing, paraphrasing and coining
new terms, allowed me understanding the bank concepts utilized to find terms especially in
Kinyarwanda language which is my main contribution. However, considering that English and
French are two languages that share a lot in common, formal equivalence was the main technique
used by this study to convey bank terms in both languages.
The findings have shown that many bank customers use Kinyarwanda (66.8%) in their daily
business in listening, speaking, writing, and reading and confirmed that the use of other language
like English presents a barrier to effective communication. Nearly 95.2% agree that using other
languages rather than Kinyarwanda puts Kinyarwanda-speaking clients at risk. However, English
was proved to be a prioritized language when it comes to Bank services that need form
completion.
