Trilingual Glossary of Bank Basic terms (English- French- Kinyarwanda) to bridge the communication gap in bank documents.

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.