I think you are on the wrong track. Of course, in the end you can find the equivalent term that someone used somewhere.
But look at it from a different perspective.
Take a term that is used and understood in the rationalist community. Say “Moloch”.
Now try to write an opinion piece to The Washington Post. If you want to refer to the concept of “Moloch” you can either explain it, wasting your allotted 3000 characters quickly, or just say “Moloch” and hope someone would get it. In the latter case one or two people may get it and the rest would think you are a crackpot referring to the ancient Phoenician deity in a completely unrelated context.
The problem is that the rationalist community is too small for its terminology “to be in the Overton window”. Not so with economic terminology. That community is large enough and the terms like “economies of scale” are admissible in public discourse.
Now scale that down to a small language community. Suddenly, the rationalist community is so small that it, for all practical purposes, does not exist. The economists are now in the position that the rationalists were in in the anglosphere. There are few of them and their terminology is not widely understood and accepted.
In other words: In the US you can’t make an argument in public discussion involving rationalist concepts. But you can use economic terminology and get away with it. In Slovakia, you often can’t.
Sorry, I should have made it more explicit that I wasn’t making any sort of objection to your general point, just wondering about the specific examples you used.
I completely agree that, whether or not there are Slovak terms that are good translations of “economies of scale” and “single point of failure”, there are definitely some languages, or dialects, or systems of technical terminology, in which there are some things that can’t be said so easily in some others, and that limits on what can easily be talked about are important, and that what communities’ ideas end up with a barrier to entry into public discourse will depend on the size of the community and the size and quirks of whatever larger community they’re embedded in.
I’m not wholly convinced, though, that the size of the larger community is really the point. (To be clear, this is no part of what I was saying before, it’s just something I notice while affirming that I agree with all those things I agree with.) If I try to get my head around the mechanisms whereby there aren’t (assuming that indeed there aren’t) Slovak terms for various standard economics concepts, the size of the Slovak-speaking world seems to enter in only quite indirectly: it’s something like “Slovakia isn’t a large market, so there aren’t a lot of translations of English-language economics texts into Slovak, so the main channel by which those terms would have got into the Slovak language is rather narrow, so those terms haven’t had much chance to take hold”. All of which might be true, and does have to do with the size of the community—but (1) only quite indirectly, and (2) it seems like there are other equally plausible mechanisms that have nothing to do with the size of the community. Maybe there are more economists in richer countries, and Slovakia is relatively poor, and so doesn’t have a lot of people who have been exposed to technical terms of economics. Maybe it’s relevant that Slovakia used to be part of the Soviet bloc where the prevailing approach to economics was very different from what we have in the West, and that has meant that there are fewer economists now, or that the ideas taught in economics courses are different, or something. Etc.
(Maybe you are actually proposing a direct effect of absolute community size: you need at least N people to make your community and its terminology visible enough for others to take notice. But it seems much more likely to me that the requirement there is for a certain fraction of the community, maybe a fraction “weighted by prestige” in some sense. I would expect the ideas and terminology of a 1000-person community in a country of 10M to have about the same amount of influence as those of a 100,000-person community in a country of 1B. I think.)
What about in translations of English texts? (I’m guessing that’s pretty common, but have no actual idea.)
I think you are on the wrong track. Of course, in the end you can find the equivalent term that someone used somewhere.
But look at it from a different perspective.
Take a term that is used and understood in the rationalist community. Say “Moloch”.
Now try to write an opinion piece to The Washington Post. If you want to refer to the concept of “Moloch” you can either explain it, wasting your allotted 3000 characters quickly, or just say “Moloch” and hope someone would get it. In the latter case one or two people may get it and the rest would think you are a crackpot referring to the ancient Phoenician deity in a completely unrelated context.
The problem is that the rationalist community is too small for its terminology “to be in the Overton window”. Not so with economic terminology. That community is large enough and the terms like “economies of scale” are admissible in public discourse.
Now scale that down to a small language community. Suddenly, the rationalist community is so small that it, for all practical purposes, does not exist. The economists are now in the position that the rationalists were in in the anglosphere. There are few of them and their terminology is not widely understood and accepted.
In other words: In the US you can’t make an argument in public discussion involving rationalist concepts. But you can use economic terminology and get away with it. In Slovakia, you often can’t.
Sorry, I should have made it more explicit that I wasn’t making any sort of objection to your general point, just wondering about the specific examples you used.
I completely agree that, whether or not there are Slovak terms that are good translations of “economies of scale” and “single point of failure”, there are definitely some languages, or dialects, or systems of technical terminology, in which there are some things that can’t be said so easily in some others, and that limits on what can easily be talked about are important, and that what communities’ ideas end up with a barrier to entry into public discourse will depend on the size of the community and the size and quirks of whatever larger community they’re embedded in.
I’m not wholly convinced, though, that the size of the larger community is really the point. (To be clear, this is no part of what I was saying before, it’s just something I notice while affirming that I agree with all those things I agree with.) If I try to get my head around the mechanisms whereby there aren’t (assuming that indeed there aren’t) Slovak terms for various standard economics concepts, the size of the Slovak-speaking world seems to enter in only quite indirectly: it’s something like “Slovakia isn’t a large market, so there aren’t a lot of translations of English-language economics texts into Slovak, so the main channel by which those terms would have got into the Slovak language is rather narrow, so those terms haven’t had much chance to take hold”. All of which might be true, and does have to do with the size of the community—but (1) only quite indirectly, and (2) it seems like there are other equally plausible mechanisms that have nothing to do with the size of the community. Maybe there are more economists in richer countries, and Slovakia is relatively poor, and so doesn’t have a lot of people who have been exposed to technical terms of economics. Maybe it’s relevant that Slovakia used to be part of the Soviet bloc where the prevailing approach to economics was very different from what we have in the West, and that has meant that there are fewer economists now, or that the ideas taught in economics courses are different, or something. Etc.
(Maybe you are actually proposing a direct effect of absolute community size: you need at least N people to make your community and its terminology visible enough for others to take notice. But it seems much more likely to me that the requirement there is for a certain fraction of the community, maybe a fraction “weighted by prestige” in some sense. I would expect the ideas and terminology of a 1000-person community in a country of 10M to have about the same amount of influence as those of a 100,000-person community in a country of 1B. I think.)