et non pas "in the red" = déficitaire

jargon financier habituel

English term (edited): to end in the black

This is the ideal classic case for me, I issued so many of these shareholders reports, as President/CEO of a company. I just couldn't miss it !
The term 'black' refers to the color of the ink used by the underling accountants reporting financial results. In the context of history, it hasn't been very long since accountants stopped wearing green eye-shades, pocket-protectors, thick myopic eyeglasses and no no no possibility of ever getting out of their dark scriptural chambers filled with cigar smoke, where they were toiling hard, painfully leaned over for hours over a scriptorial desk to produce, using quill pens, accounting reports inside huge ledgers that looked so big they should be able to contain the entire knowledge of humanity !
Those poor quill pen artists did not know better than to use different colors to denote positive and negative figures.
Therefore, having two inkwells in front of them, one with regular black ink, one with red ink to attract the attention on a negative number, they punctually and relentlessly reported ! For God's sake, red ink meant either a debit (not so bad), or a loss (oh!oh! no please!) and their job might be on the line !
Since the Directors, shareholders, Officers, and other bigwigs in the company only paid attention to the bottom line, after all these laborious intermediate and no doubt sleep-inducing calculation steps were performed by the underpaid overachievers of the minutiae-devotees of the scribes persuasion, the important piece of information these busy executives were looking for primarily was just the color of the answer! Black meant good (a profit, after all details were skipped), and red meant very bad news, an unfortunate loss for the accounting period.
In modern times, things may in appearance look very different. Modern technology has replaced all the tedious calculations of these poor chaps with binary instructions coded by human programmers and only understood by huge computers in their own climate-controlled cathedrals of "data processing", thereby relegating the unfortunate old-style accountants and their paraphernalia of green eye-shades, thick glasses, cigars and all that to the rank and status of the Dodo birds, extinct !
Nevertheless, the bottom line, surprisingly, is sometimes still displayed in red (loss) or black (profit) in particular in fancy shareholders reports where graphic special effects extend to the color of the result. Yes, some reports show losses with a negative sign, or parentheses, but who needs such timidity when you can shock the reader with a color ? (at least to those readers who are not color-blind, don't see losses, and thereby are condemned to perpetual optimism !)
So, the tradition of using the expressions "in the black" (meaning profitable) or "in the red" (meaning at a loss, potentially leading to a shareholders' proxy fight) has remained as strong as ever.
The statement at issue here is a clear example of this old tradition.

Now, there is a point of procedure here, that might be a little obscure to me. The term defined as the source term is "to end in the black", while the example sentence cites "ended in the black". I will presume one should go with the official definition of the source term, not the example.

If the task at hand called for an exact translation of the example, then my answer would be "ont clôturé, résultant en un profit net", an exact reflection of "ended in the black". However, since the task at hand is to translate the actual source term as stated, "to end in the black", then I have to go with my stated answer as filed. Inattention to details, in accounting as in translation, is the principal pitfall to avoid.
notURmonkey





--------------------------------------------------
Note added at 2 days16 hrs (2011-07-10 21:55:25 GMT)
--------------------------------------------------

I pressed "enter" instead of "tab" to attempt to write a second sentence, and the computer, no doubt bored to death, took that as "done for".
Here would be another example sentence :"I am pleased to announce that in spite of the difficulties experienced in previous quarters, and since we ended up so close to break-even, however slightly in the red, our prospects for the next quarter, and the sales results so far, are clearly indicating our company will end in the black, however slightly. Thank you for your attention and time; please now direct your attention to the open bar for the privileged enjoyment of our faithful shareholders."