With the Spanish translation of both volumes of The Economy 2.0 now complete, Antonio Cabrales and Humberto Llavador, two of the economists who guided the project, joined us to reflect on the process. Both contributed to the translation as part of CORE’s community of academics, working alongside the professional translation team.
Thanks for taking the time to speak with us today. How did you both first get involved with CORE?
Antonio: I got involved in The Economy 1.0 after seeing CORE director Wendy Carlin give a talk at the Bank of England. She said we needed a new way of teaching students about the economy, that the world had moved forward, and that our research was very different from what we were teaching. That’s a strange situation to be in, where students get taught something that current research has transcended in many ways.
I ended up getting involved as a co-author on Unit 4. I thought the CORE concept was very interesting. The way they developed it, a joint production effort from many people, with oversight from a committee, was very different from a standard textbook.
Humberto: I joined CORE a bit later than Antonio. I wasn’t satisfied with what I was teaching, and my students didn’t believe the type of models we were using. Particularly when we were talking about the labour market, with perfectly competitive markets and the traditional explanation for unemployment.
I attended a CORE workshop and got involved in the community mostly through what’s become Experiencing Economics. Later, I gave feedback as a user of The Economy 1.0. My contribution was more on particular issues, and in the revision between 1.0 and 2.0 I critically reviewed many of the chapters, the new models, and the new perspectives.
What roles did you play in the translation of The Economy 2.0?
Antonio: Professional translators are an essential part of the translation process, but a professional translator perhaps doesn’t understand economic concepts in the same way we do. And we want students in our community to understand economic language the way we understand it. That’s where we got involved.
Humberto: The translators are professionals, but we wanted to make sure, first, that the use of terminology was accurate in economic terms, and second, that the language is appropriate for students. So we helped keep the translated material closer to the kind of vocabulary and texts our students are used to.
Did the translation approach for The Economy 2.0 differ from 1.0?
Antonio: I don’t remember any big changes. I think the basic problems remain more or less the same, and there are two more fundamental ones.
The first is that economists use words in somewhat different ways than other people. When a professional translator translates, they reflect how a person in the street speaks. It doesn’t always match up.
The second is the difference between Spain and Latin America. It’s not all that dissimilar from the US and UK in a sense, but some terms are used in different ways in different places. Those are the two major things, and those didn’t change very much from 1.0 to 2.0.
You ended up going with Castilian Spanish rather than Latin American Spanish as a general rule. What was behind that decision?
Antonio: Humberto and I are both Castilian speakers, and are not comfortable imposing our view of the speech in Latin America onto Latin Americans. The professional translators were also from Spain. I don’t feel comfortable trying to guess what people from Latin America would understand in each case. I’m pretty sure people from Mexico and Argentina use words in very different ways too. That would be even more difficult to standardize.
None of these differences are really major, though. In my youth, I read lots of books translated from English by a big publishing house called Fondo de Cultura Económica, from Mexico. I read Oscar Lange and Karl Marx, translated by the Fondo, because I grew up at a time when Franco had just died, so some of the Marxists were translated in Mexico rather than in Spain. There were some small, minor differences, but they weren’t very big.
Humberto: If I remember correctly, the decision also came partly from blind samples. Several translators were considered. We ended up with translators who happened to be Spanish, so it made sense that they would use Spanish from Spain.
Humberto, when you read the translated text as part of the translation process, did it change the way you read it as an economist?
Humberto: It did, because you pay a lot of attention to the perspective of the student, rather than the perspective of another economist. Many times, when an economist reads an introductory textbook, you know most of the concepts already, you know the reasoning, and you focus on perspective: what is the best way to teach it?
When I was reading as a curator for the translation, I really paid attention to the details, sentence by sentence, making sure there was a good connection in the story, that it didn’t repeat itself, and that there was good use of terminology. Terminology becomes crucial.
The role of the translators themselves, Dulcinea Otero-Piñeiro and José María Izquierdo-Tapia, was spectacular. The quality meant we didn’t have to contribute a lot, and most of the discussion happened beforehand, going through the glossary. Once we agreed on what each term meant and what the proper translation for each was, the rest was minor things here and there.
Were there particular terms that gave you trouble?
Humberto: There is terminology we use in very specific ways in economics that non-economists tend to translate literally. However the literal translation doesn’t always convey the same meaning, emphasis, or idea. The hardest part is dealing with terms difficult to translate into Spanish because they are very unique to the English language, and we are used to using the English term.
A good example is shirking. In the labour market, it has a very specific connotation in English. The translations into Spanish are more negative, or they don’t convey the same idea.
Shirking doesn’t necessarily mean to be lazy, mean, or unethical; it depends on the context. It was difficult to find an equivalent term in Spanish, and we ended up using escaqueo which, I think, is accurate enough, and commonly used.
Antonio: There were quite a few places where the professional translators had difficulty with our economic slang, and I agree with them; it feels outside the normal usage and sounds a bit strange. But this is a little like in maths: once you define a term, you want to see it repeatedly used in the same way, because otherwise it gets confusing.
The example that always comes up when teaching introductory economics is public goods, bienes públicos. Non-economists think of a public good as a good that is provided by the government, which tends to mean health and education. That is not what an economist thinks. A public good has a very precise definition: it has to do with whether, once you use it, other people can use it at the same time. Think about the environment, or the light coming from the sun—those are public goods. An idea is a public good: if I have an idea for how to create a vaccine, anyone can use it.
That’s not a public good as understood by the general population, who would think public goods are education, health, defence, and so on. Sometimes they coincide. With defence it’s clear: security is a public good. But health is not a public good; health is a private good. There are public connotations and external effects, but it’s not a public good from the point of view of an economist. Those are the kinds of things where we use a word that has one meaning for the general audience and another when used by an economist.
How important is it to be strict about translating terms like these, rather than just using English? In some translations they prefer to use the English term; in others, such as with our Finnish translation, they created entirely new words.
Humberto: This is a debate. I don’t mind using English, and sometimes I’d rather use the English term. But if you aren’t an English speaker and you don’t associate a particular meaning with a word, you need to know what that word tells you in your own language. That isn’t the case for people who have acquired a big part of their economic knowledge in English. But if you learn the concepts in your own language, that’s language they make sense to you.
English is also very good at making verbs out of everything. You can ‘FedEx’ something. In Spanish, you can’t. You have to send something with FedEx. In a lot of English scientific terminology this is useful, because you can take actions out of nouns, and that simplifies and shortens the way you specify things. Shirking is like that: in Spanish you need a longer sentence to convey the exact same idea.
So, for example, to label a graph, it’s more convenient to use ‘no-shirking curve’ than ‘the curve where people decide not to shirk’. Sometimes it’s not really about the term itself, but convenience. It would happen the other way around too: if we had to translate from Spanish to English, we would face similar problems.
Was AI used in the translation?
Humberto: No. I needed to make sure it made sense when I read it from the perspective of my students, and I don’t know yet how to tell AI to put itself in the position of my students. I think it would have taken longer to train an AI than it took to actually read it. And then I would have missed the opportunity to learn from reading the text from this perspective. That’s a positive side effect; not the main purpose, but a positive externality.
Does the translation help with broadening access to economics education?
Antonio: There are many places in Spain where students come from networks that aren’t so well established, where the parents might not be particularly wealthy, and in those environments English is not used as much. It’s even more extreme in Latin America. So the translation does help.
What would you say to instructors who are still using The Economy 1.0 about why they should consider moving to 2.0?
Antonio: The biggest change, and it’s actually a pretty important change, is the handling of the labour market. 1.0 has frictions that come from information. It uses a labour-discipline model in which, because I cannot control exactly how much effort people put in, I need to use the threat of layoffs as a way to keep people making enough effort. That’s part of what’s going on, but it’s not everything. In fact, macroeconomists and labour economists have long used the other important friction, which is search. I have a certain set of skills; firms need a different or the same set of skills; everyone is trying to match. Search models are important to understand why unemployment exists, and why simply changing the wage is not going to equilibrate the labour market.
Having only one of those frictions makes the understanding of the labour market limited. And the whole macro model is built around the labour market, so you cannot understand the macroeconomy well if you don’t understand the labour market completely. One of the main advantages of The Economy 2.0 is that you can use the same model for the microeconomy and the macroeconomy. Everything is integrated, everything is well micro-founded.
If you look at standard macroeconomics textbooks outside The Economy, they teach one model in the micro part, and then in the macro part, miraculously, unemployment happens, and all these other things, and they seem like two different worlds. In our model, everything fits together.
Humberto: 2.0 has managed to extend the models while simplifying the explanation. In my experience, it’s easier for students to understand it, in particular to play with the current version of the labour market. They find it more manageable than the previous version in 1.0. One of the major reasons to switch from 1.0 to 2.0 is that you have a richer model to explain many more things. At the same time, it’s easier to teach, easier to understand, and easier to play with in order to understand policies, and how the labour market actually works.
The translation of 2.0 ensures that CORE can reach many places where Spanish is used, and that those places can also update. 2.0 is a big improvement on many chapters and on the presentation of the models and the examples. It’s not just a beautifying of 1.0; there are real changes. Having the Spanish translation of 2.0 is a big deal for places teaching in Spanish.
Thank you both for your time.
Both volumes of La economía 2.0 are fully available for free on the CORE website.
