Earlier this year, we spoke with Anna Poerbonegoro, a lecturer at Parahyangan Catholic University in Indonesia, about her department’s transition to CORE and her parallel project to translate The Economy 2.0 into Bahasa Indonesia. Several months after our first conversation, we caught up with Anna to see how things were going.
Hi Anna, thanks for joining us again. How is the translation work going? Last time we spoke, you were just starting.
We had a small workshop in my department today, in fact. Seven or eight of us went through the glossary together. I’d prepared the document in a one-page landscape format, divided into two columns with the original text on the left and the translated text on the right. It took much longer than I’d anticipated. After three hours, we cut it short and agreed to sleep on it. Everyone needs to take a look, write down comments, and revise the grammar in their own time. The deadline is the end of May, before our finals in mid-June. After that, we are aiming to have Unit 1 of both micro and macro translated by the end of September.
When we spoke to Niku Määttänen and the Finnish translation team about their translation, they described having to invent new Finnish words because the language didn’t have equivalents for some economics concepts. Are you finding the same thing with the Bahasa Indonesia glossary?
We actually have the opposite problem. In our language we do have words, often more than one, that could translate a given term. Take “economic rent”. In Indonesian, “rent” could mean a benefit, or money you pay for something (with quite a negative connotation), or even a kind of profit. One difficulty is trying to work out which translation fits which context, or whether we should just leave the term as it is and focus on an explanation of the term.
What principles are you using to guide your decisions?
What we keep coming back to is that students who are equipped with the material in The Economy should later be able to pick up an economics journal article and recognise the terms they’re seeing. If we translate every term into Bahasa Indonesia, we won’t achieve that. So we’ve decided not to translate certain technical terms like “game theory” or “economic rent”, and to explain them in Bahasa Indonesia in the glossary instead.
You can translate word-for-word if you want to, but the end result is just ridiculous. One of my colleagues is also working on translating another textbook into Indonesian, not CORE, and he’s running into exactly the same kind of difficulty. It’s common.
Last time we spoke, you mentioned you were still deciding between AI translation and a fully manual approach. Where have you landed?
Our team decided to use Quillbot to help with speedier results. We did some comparisons between Quillbot and other AI translation software and found they produced similar outcomes. Quillbot gave a substantially lower price point, so we went with that. After the translation is done, we’ll dive in to inspect and revise each chunk of work manually to ensure appropriateness. Careful human work must always sit on top.
And on the adoption side, has the pilot started rolling?
Not yet. We’re still in the middle of a semester that isn’t using CORE. Next semester I’ll start adopting the micro material for our Principles class. As planned, we’ll adopt CORE partially at first, paired with Mankiw, and shift in favour of more CORE content each semester until our new curriculum is introduced in 2028.
Since we last spoke there has been increasing interest in CORE in Indonesia. Several instructors have reached out to us. Have you felt any momentum building?
I’ve spoken to a colleague at the University of Indonesia who is interested in collaborating with us. My dean has also asked me to explain the CORE pedagogy to the other departments on our campus that teach Principles. We’re planning a series of dissemination meetings in mid-June, during exam week, when people have a little more free time and are more open to new ideas.
That’s exciting. Worth catching up again after those meetings.
Yes. Everyone in my department is excited about reaching out to other schools. The next big push has to wait for the summer term, after the exams, when we have a bit more flexibility.
You came over to the UK for our CORE workshop at Loughborough University in March. How did you find it?
The Loughborough workshop was very productive, particularly with regard to AI. I’m not a big fan of AI, but the workshop made me realise the importance of catching up with its use and putting more effort into mediating its presence in my courses. I’m very enthusiastic about Tamo Halder’s upcoming AI Tutor, which he discussed in one of the sessions. I think it will be tremendously useful for students as well as instructors. When I told our faculty members about it, they considered it a breakthrough idea.
We’re also designing a new online course on economic thinking aimed at the general public and interested high school students. CORE’s upcoming Understanding our Economy textbook sounds like a perfect primary reference for that course. I look forward to its release!
Read the Stone Centre’s interview with Tamo about his AI economics tutor.
Anna, thank you so much. We look forward to catching up again and seeing how things develop.
For the background to this project, see our first conversation with Anna. For a contrasting perspective on the linguistic side of translation, our interview with Niku Määttänen on the Finnish translation team describes the challenge of inventing new Finnish words for economics concepts that had no native equivalent.
