Based on a literature review in the field of accounting translation, the article discusses the actual needs for translation of financial statements, as well as the main difficulties associated with the transfer of this type of text. Reference is made to the impossibility of using functional equivalents in many cases, due to the coexistence of different accounting standards across countries and to the difficulty of determining the needs and expectations of translations’ end users. Next, the article evaluates the usefulness of legal sources, and of parallel texts and corpora as resources for terminology extraction and ambiguity clarification in the translation of financial statements. To this end, two types of sources are analyzed, namely International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and financial statements of Spanish, British and US companies. The results confirm the need to encourage the acquisition of subject competences by trainees as an essential supplement to the info-mining and translation competences.