Is ESEF ready to work in the 23 languages of the European Union? YES

Is the ESEF taxonomy 2017 published in all 23 European languages? Almost, but it’s not. While the taxonomy ESEF 2017 has published 5,157 English labels, for the other 22 languages ESEF only has 4,610 labels.

Why? In the ESEF taxonomy 2017, the label linkbase defines 4,610 labels, plus another 547 labelRoles with different variations of the standard label (totalLabel, periodStartLabel, periodEndLabel, terseLabel, negatedLabel, negatedTerseLabel, negatedTotalLabel and netLabel). These 547 labelRoles are defined only in the label linkbase for English, but not for the other 22 local languages.

Impact? In languages other than English, the usual XBRL software presents about a 12% of missing labels (usually represented by the qname, id or name of the item, or English label at best) in the middle of local language labels.

What about ESEF taxonomies 2019 / 2020? There are 5,613 / 5,618 English labels, but only 5,028 / 5,033 labels in each of the other 22 languages (585 missing labelRoles per language). A total of 12,870 missing labelRoles!.

Don’t panic! Download for free the ESEF 2017, 2019 and 2020 Illustrated Taxonomies (oriented to users, easy to read), with 23 languages in an Excel workbook, now including the missing labelRoles

How it was fixed? Simply by using this open source ESEF Label Linkbase Generator Program, which takes the 23 ESEF label linkbase files and generates two folders with the 22 non-English label linkbase files, one with the missing labelroles only (download here 2019 or here 2020 ), and the other with the missing labelRoles added to the original labels (download here 2019 or here 2020 ). It is a simple Excel macro run with the files ESEF 2017 or 2019 or 2020. See the Eurofiling Annual Report as test case with taxonomy package here.

How it works? The document ESEF Label Roles Generator for Languages (other than English) describe each Role, case by case, with the recommended solution for generating the corresponding labelRole programmatically.

How to use the Label Roles? The files for ESEF 2019 and ESEF 2020 are currently hosted by the Eurofiling Foundation for testing purposes. The rationale and details for this hosting is explained in this document.

Download also for free the ESEF 2019 Illustrated Taxonomy (with no translations for labelRoles) as Excel visualization from AMANA here, as well as from Reporting Standard here. Corefiling offers a free taxonomy viewer (requires to create a free login).