The new zero
Translation is an exercise in finding congruencies between cultures. The words are mere markers for the underlying context, like stones in a Zen garden intimating the presence of subterranean, or subconscious, worlds. Those worlds constitute what is inadequately called “culture” – a force increasingly recognized as one of the mechanisms, other than genes, by which we humans as a species have evolved.
Cultures can be thought of as bounded by membranes, containing the identity and thinking of different peoples and allowing an understanding of “us” versus “them”. Nowhere is this more important than in the all-pervasive field of finance. Finance may be global, but financial cultures remain discrete.
John Wiley & Sons, the international publishing group, did not perhaps understand the scale of the challenge when it commissioned a book1 on China’s financial markets, including its banking systems, stock markets, insurance companies and overarching legal framework. As the Editors-in-Chief we accepted the challenge, perhaps also unaware of the difficulties ahead. Our team assembled a group of 34 contributors from China and the West2; the Chinese authors wrote in their own language, which was then translated into English.
Translating ideas between two distinctively different and complex financial systems and cultures is a daunting enterprise. Those who translate word for word are often unable to find equivalent meanings for set expressions and colloquialisms, resulting in a stilted approximation. Intermediaries between cultures (in this case the editors) have to think beyond the words to recognize the lacunae, the holes in the matrix of understanding, as well as finding sufficient congruency between the underlying meanings.
In China’s stock market, for example, there is as yet no mechanism for short-selling. The absence of ways to make money other than through market appreciation can sometimes explain why indices climb to new highs. Not all westerners understand this. The unspoken assumptions of Chinese authors are therefore lost on a non-Chinese audience. When translating from Chinese into English, we were constantly on the lookout for things that were not being said as much as those that were actually being said.
1 China’s Emerging Financial Markets. Edited by Min Zhu, Jinqing Cai, Martha Avery. Pages: 656. Published by: John Wiley & Sons 2009. ISBN: # 978-0-470-82249-4
2 Authors include Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Zhou Xiaochuan, Governor of the People’s Bank of China, and other western and Chinese leaders in the fields of banking, capital markets and the insurance industry as well as government policymakers. There is a foreword by Paul Volcker.