Ask HN: Can you discuss CS in your native language? • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by wenc » Mon, Jun 01, 2020, 11:39 PM UTC

rglullis wrote: post #47

qwerty456127 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Check out the number of questions on those sites:

Pt: 140,876

Ru: 322,061

Es: 122,603

Jp: 22,743

Stackoverflow.com (EN): 19,580,539

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

#52

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jun 01, 2020, 11:42 PM UTC

rglullis wrote: post #47

qwerty456127 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#53

Post by wenc » Mon, Jun 01, 2020, 11:46 PM UTC

Vespasian wrote: post #21

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)

I remember back in the 90s Heise's CT magazine used to have really good articles (only in German). The prose is very heavily German with relatively few English words.

Looks like they're still around today.

https://www.heise.de/ct/

In my experience, Germans are less hung up about borrowing English words as-is, probably because they're both Germanic languages.

Speakers of Romance languages (French for instance) are more hesitant. The French generally insist on localizing borrowed terms -- l'ordinateur (computer), logiciel (software), etc. And these are actually used in real life.

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

#54

Post by zwieback » Mon, Jun 01, 2020, 11:50 PM UTC

KenoFischer wrote: post #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 d…

Me too, I got my engineering degree in Germany in 92 but moved to the US right after. At this point I really struggle to communicate anything technical in German and even while I lived there CS lingo was notoriously mixed.

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

#55

Post by rglullis » Mon, Jun 01, 2020, 11:51 PM UTC

wenc wrote: post #51

rglullis wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Check out the number of questions on those sites: Pt: 140,876 Ru: 322,061 Es: 122,603 Jp: 22,743 Stackoverflow.com (EN): 19,580,539

Does it matter?

If I spoke no English, I'd rather have 1% of the equivalent English content in Portuguese than 0%. And having the site such as pt.SO is at least a sign that there is a significant number of people that prefer non-English to keep the discussion.

Also, there is a good amount of people that can read something from English SO, but would never contribute. Having a language-specific site is a chance for them to help more people in their situation. Again better than nothing.

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

#56

Post by zwieback » Mon, Jun 01, 2020, 11:52 PM UTC

kamyarg wrote: post #29

Vespasian wrote: post #21

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)

"Nein, Committe niemals in den Master."* Nice to see I can even practice German in HN. * Needless to say, excuse my (possibly) horrible German.

Committe lieber in den Ast (I'm sure nobody use that for branch, right?)

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

#57

Post by qwerty456127 » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 12:04 AM UTC

rglullis wrote: post #47

qwerty456127 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> cough cough

I know of the localized versions of StackOverflow but they hardly are worth visiting.

> 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.

It's not an issue, it's awesome.

> 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.

Obviously. Yet I would never use any other language to name a variable or a function. I would also use English and only English to write a manual for a library I might invent as that would mean most of the developers would be able to read it immediately without me having to waste my time on writing in different languages.

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

#58

Post by WrtCdEvrydy » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 12:10 AM UTC

feiss wrote: post #11

You can do it in Spanish, but there's a lot of vocabulary that either sounds really weird when translated or there's not a translation. So we use English words mixed in the discourse.

Asere, te voy a tirar este PR a QA a ver si funciona, apruevalo for favor.

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

#59

Post by sanxiyn » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 12:20 AM UTC

qwerty456127 wrote: post #57

rglullis wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> cough cough I know of the localized versions of StackOverflow but they hardly are worth visiting. > 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. It's not an issue, it's awesome. > But this in no point is an exclusive thing. There is nothing that says that if you participate in HN in Engl…

People considering writing in different languages to be waste of time is part of the problem.

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

#60

Post by jhanschoo » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 12:22 AM UTC

tomca32 wrote: post #19

Tade0 wrote: 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…

Well to someone who have never heard of them, "floppy disk" and "mouse" are themselves very comical words to describe the machinery they refer to.

The worst part about those calques are their lack of brevity.