The Finnish translation of The Economy 2.0 is a rigorous group effort involving two professional translators and a team of economics professors. Backed by the Bank of Finland and the Finnish financial services group LähiTapiola, The project is led by Mari Kröger from the Helsinki GSE administration. Niku Määttänen, a professor of macroeconomics at the University of Helsinki, is part of the team checking translations. Niku also worked on the Finnish translation of The Economy 1.0 aka Talous. We chatted with Niku to get his perspective on the translation process, including the creation of new Finnish words to facilitate the translation.
Hi Niku, thanks for joining us. Tell us a little about your ongoing work translating The Economy 2.0.
It’s a challenging task because it’s a scientific text and we need to be very precise. We’re working with two professional translators, Marja Ollila and Maarit Tillman-Leino, who are super cool. We had many comments on their first drafts, but they’re both great at responding to feedback. A group of five or six professors, including myself, consider the translated vocabulary and read selected chapters distributed based on our expertise.
It’s a very interesting process. One of our tasks is to help with translating the key terms in a uniform way. For most technical economics terms, everyone knows what the translation is because there already existed a word in Finnish in general use. But there were several very important concepts for which we didn’t have a word in Finnish, at least not one that everyone would agree upon.
Some English terms commonly used in economics, such as “moral hazard” (moraalikato), are difficult to translate because they sound somewhat odd even in English–at least to me. When I’m teaching in Finnish, I often teach the expression in English too, so the students know what I’m referring to. For some other very important terms, like “economic rent” (ylituotto), I think we came up with a very nice, idiomatic expression that has spread here in Finland, which is great.
Other CORE translations use the English term when a native term doesn’t exist. It’s interesting that even though many people in Finland are well-versed in English, the decision was made to create new words.
Maybe it’s a matter of principle. I like the Finnish language. It’s also the duty of the academic community to help develop the Finnish language. After all, most people here in Finland speak decent English and can typically understand it pretty well. But ideally, you still have everything in your own language. I think it does help when learning the concepts, at least if the translation is a good one!
Most of our Master’s teaching is in English, so the econ students will learn the English terms in any case. But the key part is whether they are going to learn the Finnish parts. There’s value in trying to come up with a good Finnish vocabulary for discussing things based on economics. Things like “demand” and “supply” of course have Finnish versions as part of everyday vocabulary, but some terms are more closely related to economics and only used in that context. In those cases, we sometimes needed to come up with a new term or choose among alternative translations already in circulation.
How has the translation process evolved from The Economy 1.0 to The Economy 2.0?
I’m confident it’s going to be a lot less work this time around. I don’t think there are going to be many more new terms in the second volume compared to the first. We have the vocabulary there, so that’s going to help a lot.
An emerging challenge for economics teachers is a decline in students who will read long-form texts. Will the translation help get more students comfortable with reading for longer?
Yeah, I’ve noticed that too. The writing has deteriorated somewhat as well. One thing I very much like in CORE is the extent to which the book gives historical background and examples—there’s a lot of economic history. As a teacher, I have a limited number of lectures to teach the principles of economics, so we can’t discuss every historical example in class, but I do encourage the students to read those parts. I will make a bigger effort to enforce it because it’s important for them to get used to the vocabulary and the way we describe things like economic development without just graphs or maths. The best students do appreciate this.
Do you know who is using the current translation?
My understanding is more or less everyone. I’d guess all econ programs here in Finland. It’s open access and it’s in Finnish, so why not?
We actually made another resource targeted to younger students. A “light” introduction to economics. We were unhappy with how economics was taught in high school. Typically, those textbooks discuss what type of mortgage you should take or the stock market; it’s super narrow and doesn’t have the societal aspect emphasised in CORE.
We talk about things like public goods, pay-as-you-go vs. fully funded pension systems, and ideas as a source of long-run growth. You don’t need math to explain those ideas, but they open up more interesting ideas than the typical textbooks. The idea was to advertise economics and show that it’s about big questions and how society works.
Many thanks to Niku and the Finnish translation team for their work translating The Economy and The Economy 2.0.
Visit https://talouskurssi.fi/ (in Finnish) to discover the team’s high school economics resources.
