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It would seem to my brain as if I talking about those actual things and not the abstract CS concepts i.e. saying "a tree" in would just make it seem we talking about actual green trees outside so I'd start laughing probably.
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’m curious as to why master and branch are borrowed rather than translated. Those seem straightforward enough to translate. But then again, I don’t speak German and I’m not a linguist.
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?
CJK have different strategies for localizing technical terms. I don't know about Korean, but Japanese tends toward transliterating English terms whereas comparatively Chinese tends toward inventing calques.
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?
No, we cannot use native languages for CS. For Sinhalese, there is an on-going attempt to invent words or rather put words together to translate a technical term to Sinhalese, but nobody can figure it out. "Download", for example, is literally translated to a word that doubles as taking something down via a crane, and it has become a sort of a joke that the linguistics even attempted to translate.
However, in Sri Lanka, English is one of the official languages and university courses are in English, even the non-CS majors. Professionally, pretty much every company is using English for both team and client communication.
Other than a few starter YouTubers, I have yet to see anyone meaningfully using Sinhalese in CS.
It is a similar situation in Indonesia too, although more Indonesian words are used. Indonesian itself is rather limited due to its limited nature, and borrows many of the words from English and Dutch. The former languages in the archipelago such as Javanese and Sundanese tend to be quite limited for technical literature, but rich with grammar and meaning.
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…
Expecting everyone to speak English before being able to make any meaningful work is not that different than expecting only able-bodied people to make any meaningful work.
You being shocked that there are non-English speakers working with tech is no different than being shocked by blind programmers.
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’m curious as to why master and branch are borrowed rather than translated. Those seem straightforward enough to translate. But then again, I don’t speak German and I’m not a linguist.
And if I were to try to translate "master", it would end up translated as a word that could be equally well translated back to English as "lord", which is just silly.
We have "Informatik" which comes in the flavours:
Theoretische Informatik, which is low-level Computer Science, think information theory.
Praktische Informatik, which is high-level Comouter Science, like programming language design and software architecture.
Angewandte Informatik, which is software development, like apps, databases etc.
Technische Informatik, which is computer engineering.
And then, of course, we have a never ending count of cross cutting CS degrees like: Medieninformatik, Bioinformatik, Wirtschaftsinformatik, Medizininformatik, etc.
This all has to be mentally moved into the right English equivalent and then translated.
I'm German. theoretical CS and maths terms are no problem because they all have a German equivalent. More programming related lingo is more difficult because it's so heavily dominated by the anglosphere that I (and a lot of people I know) just adopt the english phrases. Like git vocabulary or language related stuff.