Opinion | Claude Haberer honoured for work on dictionary

Bankers tend to be obsessed with numbers rather than words. However, one French financier has gone against the trend.

Claude Haberer, head of Asia wealth management of Swiss private bank Pictet, last week was bestowed with the French government's Chevalier in the Ordre National du Merite for his work on a French-Chinese dictionary. Besides his busy day job, Haberer is chairman of the Association Ricci, which publishes the Grand Ricci Dictionary, a 10,000-page Chinese-French dictionary and Chinese lexicon in seven volumes. He was initially attracted by the association's conferences on Chinese philosophy, but later helped the dictionary project raise funds.

The banker, who speaks fluent Putonghua and writes Chinese, helped raise an estimated US$15 million for the initial printing of the dictionary and still needs funding for future projects.

The dictionary was named after Matteo Ricci, the founding Jesuit missionary in China who arrived in Macau in 1583 and studied the Chinese language.

In the 1800s, the Jesuits set up a centre in Shanghai to study the language, history and culture of China. They produced about 200 books of definitions, proverbs and linguistic analysis.

When the Communist Party took control in 1949, a Hungarian priest, Eugene Zsamar, was determined to continue that mission.

Arriving in Macau, he began a project in 1952 to create Chinese dictionaries in five different languages - French, Latin, English, Hungarian and Spanish.