Here’s a riddle. I’m a translator, but I only know one language. I can’t talk in my Welsh Mam’s mother tongue and my Francophonic floundering leaves my friends in fits of giggles. I did German GCSE, but plonk me in the middle of Prussia and I’m not certain that asking the way to the nearest Italian restaurant would be enough to keep me out of trouble. I can only speak one language and it’s English.
I call myself a translator because, thanks to five and a bit misguided years doing two biochemistry degrees, I can change things like this:
“p53-p66shc/miR-21-Sod2 signalling is critical for the inhibitory effect of betulinic acid on hepatocellular carcinoma”
into things like this:
“A chemical called betulinic acid can slow down the growth of liver cancer cells, but it’s only effective when a gene called p53 is fully functional.”
It’s now my job to do this every day – to transform scientific language from gibberish and gobbledegook into something more digestible. When I’m feeling particularly puffed up, I think of myself as Hermes, passing messages down to Earth from the gods of science. And while the day-to-day office reality is certainly less grand, I hope that my efforts mean that people can appreciate some of the divine wonder of scientific research without having to spend their youth in dimly lit laboratories and libraries.
There’s no Rosetta Stone for scientific translation. It’s quite simple really. The first step is getting rid of the technical language. Whenever I start work on refining a rough-hewn chunk of raw science into something more pleasant I use David Dobbs’ (rather violent) aphorism as a guiding principle: “Hunt down jargon like a mercenary possessed, and kill it.” I eviscerate acronyms and euthanise decrepit Latin and Greek. I expunge the esoteric. I trim and clip and pare and hack and burn until only the barest, most easily understood elements remain. The only technical words that escape the frenzied verbicide are those that are the subject of the story and can’t be removed (such as betulinic acid and p53 in the above) or those which represent concepts that have become so important that they have made the leap from the dusty shelves of scientific libraries into the public consciousness (the word gene makes it into the above translated sentence on that basis).
I think it helps to view jargon as a kind of shorthand. It can be useful for people as a shortcut to communicating complex concepts. But it’s intrinsically limited: it only works when all parties involved know the code. That may be an obvious point but it’s worth emphasising – to communicate an idea to a broad, non-specialist audience, it doesn’t matter how good you are at embroidering your prose with evocative imagery and clever analogies, the jargon simply must go.
This sounds like a straightforward instruction, but many enormously intelligent people fail to follow it. The trick they fail to master is to train their brains to think in two ways. One, like a scientist; and two, like someone with no scientific training whatsoever. Only in that way can you be sure which words are jargon and which are not – which words to keep and which to remove. And because I’ve learned to think in this dichotomous manner, I think my eyes and ears are particularly attuned to the jargon I encounter in everyday life.
And whenever I see or hear journalists or politicians discussing a particularly important social science – economics – I just don’t see them making the same efforts of jargon removal and technical translation. Whether it’s discussion of debt, or the argument for austerity, it’s hard to find good economics communication, where the language is rinsed free of jargon.
Take this as an example, from an excited Telegraph journalist describing the Greek financial crisis:
Late on Wednesday night, the governing council of the ECB decided that it would no longer accept Greek sovereign debt as collateral for its loans. Greece’s junk-rated bonds had been the subject of a “waiver”, where the central bank accepted sovereign and bank debt as security in return for cheap ECB funding.
I’m a fairly intelligent man. I am deeply interested in foreign affairs. Yet I have only the vaguest sense of what the above means. Does “sovereign debt” or “junk-rated bonds” or, in this context, “collateral” mean much to the average person? Have any of these phrases truly entered the public consciousness? I would argue not. A recent survey of 1,500 University of Manchester students would agree with me. Only 40% of them could even properly define GDP.
Politicians aren’t much better. Here’s George Osborne presenting his latest budget:
While we move from deficit to surplus, this [new fiscal] charter commits us to keeping debt falling as a share of GDP each and every year – and to achieving that budget surplus by 2019-20 … Only when the OBR judge that we have real GDP growth of less than 1% a year, as measured on a rolling four-quarter basis, will that surplus no longer be required.
Eh?
You could argue that because the Telegraph example featured in its finance pages, some of its technical language could be forgiven on the basis of audience suitability. But Osborne’s budget announcement was to the country. The whole country. The whole country whose lives his decisions profoundly influence. Yet he makes no attempt whatsoever to remove the jargon in order to effectively relay what is essentially a generation-defining message. It’s simply not good enough. So why does he, and many of his establishment peers, do this?
Some of the answer can be found in the old Einsteinian cliche: “If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” Economics is clearly very difficult and solving its problems is an extremely demanding task, particularly for someone with no formal training like our dear chancellor. In Osborne’s defence, it seems to me that if the answers were obvious, then more people would agree on them. But because he – like many of his colleagues in Westminster – doesn’t really understand what he is talking about, he simply can’t describe his economic policies in simple enough terms. And into this vacuum of insight George pumps his jargon, which gives him an air of understanding that is just about convincing enough to maintain power.
The other part of the explanation is that politicians deliberately use jargon to diffuse our ire and frustrations. They pitch their speeches and briefings at a level most of us will never understand in order to limit public scrutiny. Their reasoning is thus: if we can’t understand what they’re talking about then how can we possibly begin to question them? Advertisers do the same thing when they use pseudoscience to market their products. They say things like “the pentapeptides in our anti-ageing cream are the active ingredient” or “our makeup remover contains micellar water to give you a fresher look”. Although this is complete drivel, the advertisers know that many of us are happy to accept the claims as fact because we don’t have the capacity to challenge them.
All of this is worrying because it represents a genuine threat to democracy. If we can’t fully comprehend the decisions that are made for us and about us by government then how we can we possibly revolt or react in an effective way? Yes, we have a responsibility to educate ourselves more on the big issues, but I also think it’s important that politicians and journalists meet us halfway.
Perhaps it would help if economics communication became recognised as a discipline in its own right, much as science communication has. Over the last 10 years or so the science communication field has exploded – there are now formalised master’s degrees and conferences where people can share ideas on how to communicate scientific ideas in an engaging way. This happened in part because science and technology has assumed a greater importance in our lives than ever before (I’m thinking of GM crops, smartphones and 3D printers, but there are many other examples). The pioneers of science communication realised that the public needed to properly engage with these developments in order to judiciously embrace or challenge them.
Economics and economic decisions are more important than ever now, too. So we should implore our journalists and politicians to write and speak to us plainly. Our democracy depends on it.
Twitter: @jamesgingell1
