Posted by Holger van Eden
As in many professions, PFM practitioners consider English their lingua franca. Conceptual thinking, development of methodology, reviews of country experience, they are all predominantly produced in English. One small problem: the majority of the world population does not count English as its mother tongue. While the managers in ministries of finance around the world, with which PFM professionals mostly interact, are highly-educated, and usually proficient in English, language issues do regularly pop up in the IMF’s field missions. To abate these issues – and to be fair, because their PFM systems differ in fundamental ways -, the Fund does send out French, Spanish and Portuguese speaking missions. Obviously the language expertise of PFM experts is much less than the diversity of languages spoken around the world. The only solution perhaps is using interpreters proficient in PFM-speak (who are in short supply), and asking (and being asked) often “what do you mean exactly?”.
Did you say "fiscal"?
A key word that leads to repeated confusion is the word “fiscal”, in the sense of fiscal policy, fiscal projections, fiscal risk, referring in English to budget aggregates and their the macroeconomic repercussions. In my own country, the Netherlands, the native word (actually derived from French) for fiscal, “fiskaal”, refers to tax policy only, not fiscal policy. As English textbooks have entered universities, the meaning of the word is now shifting. You have to be aware of the context to understand what is actually meant. In other countries, the word “fiscal” does not have a separate meaning from the word “budget”. In one a particular country where the IMF is presently supporting the development of a Fiscal Responsibility Law (FRL), it became clear to our counterpart, the Budget Director, that we were not talking about the budget more broadly, but about budget aggregates, and the processes and rules which govern their determination.
The various working groups and politicians we had had meetings with had presumably interpreted our work as focusing on “Budget Responsibility”, a much broader topic. To add to the confusion, we then discovered that the word “Responsibility” had been translated as “Management” in the native language. So the legal proposal we had been discussing for some time had the connotation “Budget Management Law”, very different from what an FRL is about in PFM speak. After some discussion of these issues, the Budget Director suggested as translation: “Prudence and Meanness with respect to Budget Aggregates Law”. That was as close a translation of the English he could think of. For the overall acceptance of such laws in the political process, titles and connotations are of course extremely important. In this case, the connotation “meanness” is perhaps unfortunate for such a useful law!
Audit or control?
There are many quite funny examples of language confusion in PFM (and I invite readers to send me examples from their experience). An English colleague working in the French Treasury was upset about the lack of the word “underspend” in French, while the word “overspend” was commonly used (“surdépense”). Problematic, if you want to extol the virtues of fiscal discipline. A colleague working in the Middle-east had problems explaining that not valuing non-financial assets did not actually mean they were worthless, as the upset counterparts understood initially. A more substantive issue in many languages is the use of the word “audit” versus the word “control”. In many Eastern European countries audit was translated with control, because of a lack of a native word. Control did not convey periodic review of financial transactions or financial systems, but rather inspection and verification of the transaction in question, leading capacity building discussion the wrong direction. In many countries, including France and the Netherlands, there is not really a good word for “audit”. As a consequence the English word has been imported in many countries.
My output is your outcome.
A final, major area of language confusion is the area of performance budgeting and management. The English language has many words that have connotations similar to performance, i.e. result, outcome, achievement, output, effect, product, end result. In countries with a tradition of budgeting for inputs, the subtle differences in these words are very hard to distinguish. The various PFM methodologies seem to make a point, moreover. not to use the terms consistently. During a training session in the Chinese provinces years ago, I learned about half-way our training week that our interpreter had been using the same word for output and outcome, because she could not really make the distinction in Chinese. This while the difference between the two, at least in my methodology, had major consequences for use, measurement and accountability.
