Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Can you discuss CS in your native language?

news.ycombinator.com

41–50 of 174 posts

Re: Ask HN: Can you discuss CS in your native language?

#41
I can speak several African languages and a few ethnic dialects(fairly common thing)indigenous to West Africa, but I consider myself, a native English speaker because I was educated entirely in English(It's the official language of my motherland).

With that being said, due to the high nature of abstraction when treating CS concepts, you'd be hard-pressed to find vocabulary built into an African language or dialect that could support any meaningful conversation on a CS topic. A few governments looked into it, but it's almost impossible to implement anything in local languages. Transliterating or translating directly from English doesn't generally work. Same for the francophone countries, and the majority of sub-Saharan Africa(including the Portuguese-speaking islands I've been to). You can have conversations in those dialects but you'll need to mix them up with English, and therefore, CS is mainly taught in English.

However, in North Africa and the League of Arab states, I've witnessed CS courses that were taught in Arabic, but the instructor had to default to English words to explain programming concept. It's usually a hilarious mix-match of English and Arabic that could be defined as a language on its own.

Re: Ask HN: Can you discuss CS in your native language?

#42
post #38

I think I can only echo most of the comments here that of course there are translations of "branch" "implementation" etc., but the norm is to adapt the English one to the language in my experience. Good example is Turkish, there have been a lot of effort into deriving enough words to be able to converse in full Turkish about the CS topics or even Scientific topics, but it was not able to "satisfy the demand". As an e…

While "branch" is loaned in Korea, "implementation" is never loaned, the translation 구현 completely satisfied that demand. In my experience, there are better and worse translations of terms, and adoption mostly depends on quality of translation.

Edit: Additional explanation. 구현 roughly means "realization", which I think is a better term than even "implementation" itself. Word "implementation" in non-programming context is translated as 시행. In Korean, "implementing an interface" sounds wrong, compared to "realizing an interface".

Re: Ask HN: Can you discuss CS in your native language?

#43
post #34
post #6

There was an idea in the 90s in Poland to have each and every computer/CS term have its native equivalent, but the ones proposed were awkward to say the least. To give an example: a mouse click was supposed to be called a "mlask", which directly translates to "a smack of the lips". Needless to say that didn't stick and nowadays only veteran programmers are even aware that such an attempt was made.

What a failure. Try non-awkward translation, instead of awkward translation! "smack of the lips" thing is a failure of awkwardness, not a failure of translation. In Korea "to click" is translated as "to press". Now, that wasn't difficult, was it?

I guess sharing (roughly) the same alphabet it was easier to adopt the English terms.

Then again some words, like "sterownik"(can be understood as "someone who steers" - driver) remain in use to this day.

Re: Ask HN: Can you discuss CS in your native language?

#44
post #12

This question actually shocked me. At least as East Asian ppl who speak Chinese, Korean or Japanese etc, it's way easier for us to discuss CS (or anything else) in native languages. I think this difficulty only exists in certain western languages.

How do you deal with programming languages' being so based on English?

Re: Ask HN: Can you discuss CS in your native language?

#45
post #19
post #6

There was an idea in the 90s in Poland to have each and every computer/CS term have its native equivalent, but the ones proposed were awkward to say the least. To give an example: a mouse click was supposed to be called a "mlask", which directly translates to "a smack of the lips". Needless to say that didn't stick and nowadays only veteran programmers are even aware that such an attempt was made.

Same thing happened in Croatia in the 90s. Silly words were introduced and then people made up even sillier words to make fun of it leading to insanities like: - čigrasto pamtilo "peg-top-like memorizer" for a floppy disk - čigrasto velepamtilo "peg-top-like big memorizer" for a hard disk - stolno potezalo - "tabletop pull-arounder" for a mouse After a while, nobody was certain what was a real term and what was a jok…

I see there was no shortage of creative self-proclaimed linguists in these parts of the lands behind the iron curtain as well.

Our expression for "mouse" was quite byzantine: "manipulator stołowo-kulotoczny" (table sphererolling manipulator?). This just begs for a TLA like "MSK".

Re: Ask HN: Can you discuss CS in your native language?

#47
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you shocked? In fact I am shocked you are shocked.

I'm shocked too. Even if your language has all the necessary words it still seems unreasonable to me to avoid learning English if you are interested in IT. One of the reasons I'd mention: almost all of the adequately fresh information is in English. Original manuals are in English, StackOverflow is in English, HN is in English, English is the lingua-franca for comments and function/class/variable names (I've seen non…

> StackOverflow is in English

cough cough

- https://pt.stackoverflow.com/

- https://ru.stackoverflow.com/

- https://es.stackoverflow.com/

- https://jp.stackoverflow.com/

More seriously though, it is a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue: more content being available in English which leads to more people having to learn English and might end up producing English content.

But this in no point is an exclusive thing. There is nothing that says that if you participate in HN in English that you must always write in English. Back when I used to collaborate on a blog, we made a point of writing in Portuguese and I tried to avoid anglicisms and loan words whenever possible. My rationale was simple: I was much younger and most of the things I wrote would never be of interest to any thought-leader or something to advance the state of the art. It could however be of interest for those in Brazil that had some interest in programming, and I didn't want the language to be yet-another-barrier for them.

Re: Ask HN: Can you discuss CS in your native language?

#48

Yes, I talk (almost) exclusively German to my co workers / friends etc. However a lot of CS specific English terms are used and adapted to fit German grammar. Example: Committest du in den Master oder hast du einen neuen Branch angelegt? (Are you comitting into the master branch or did you create a new one)

can't speak german but just wondering if literally this translates to

>committing you in the master or have you a new branch created?

if so i'm interested to know why you translated as you did, instead of something like

>are you committing to the master branch or did you create a new branch?

in particular i'm wondering why in your translation the word branch completely shifts from where it is to in the german.

Re: Ask HN: Can you discuss CS in your native language?

#49
post #45
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing happened in Croatia in the 90s. Silly words were introduced and then people made up even sillier words to make fun of it leading to insanities like: - čigrasto pamtilo "peg-top-like memorizer" for a floppy disk - čigrasto velepamtilo "peg-top-like big memorizer" for a hard disk - stolno potezalo - "tabletop pull-arounder" for a mouse After a while, nobody was certain what was a real term and what was a jok…

I see there was no shortage of creative self-proclaimed linguists in these parts of the lands behind the iron curtain as well. Our expression for "mouse" was quite byzantine: "manipulator stołowo-kulotoczny" (table sphererolling manipulator?). This just begs for a TLA like "MSK".

Korean translation of "mouse" was "squirrel", although ultimately it lost to a loan. I can't imagine why anyone thought that long-winded translation in Polish would stick.

Squirrel was chosen because it is considered cute, but mouse is considered dirty. I think that kind of consideration of association is important in translation.

Re: Ask HN: Can you discuss CS in your native language?

#50
I grew up in Germany, but have been in the US for close to a decade now and all my technical education has been here. I have tried sending technical emails in German, but it's usually an absolute disaster. I have no Frome of reference for how to actually express things correctly. I also find my non-technical written German to have suffered quite a bit. Spoken word is fine, but writing is a bit tough. I guess I just didn't do any of that for a good ten years, so it got a bit rusty.
Post reply on HN