Intermezzo: Writing about economics in another (more exotic?) language

I guess most of you have heard of Nikkei, which is known for the stock market index Nikkei 225 (it's like a Japanese version of FTSE100). Nikkei is actually a Japanese newspaper that sells 3 million copies (= three times as many as FT, incidentally) every weekday. It has a daily column on research in economics, and recently I wrote eight short pieces on "economics of communication" for the column, of course in Japanese.

It was a challenging but interesting experience. I am a native speaker of Japanese (and highly non-native speaker of English as some of you may know) so in principle it should be easier for me to write in Japanese. But I found it really hard. I think there are two reasons for it. The first is that I didn't know much of the Japanese economics jargon because my serious economics training was almost all in English. The second, which is related but much more serious, is that there are no Japanese translations for many terms in the first place. Let me give two (of many) examples.

To begin with, a half of what I wrote was about (the game theoretic analysis of) "cheap talk" but even now I still don't know how to translate it. Because it's a short phrase, I spelled the English pronunciation with Japanese characters like "chiipu toku", and fortunately the column editor liked the sound. It may well have been the very first time the term "chiipu toku" ever appeared in Japanese mass media.

The other half was about "verifiable disclosure", but again no translation for this term seemed to exist. It would be too long and awkward if I spelled the sound, so I really had to come up with a translation. There is a nice established Japanese translation for "disclosure" but there are a few equally good candidates for the word "verifiable" in that context. So I chose one that sounded best to myself. If my translation of "verifiable disclosure" becomes commonly used in Japan (at least among academics), then I should get credit for it!