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

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

#81

Post by soonnow »

anw wrote: post #74
resouer wrote: 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.

I think it is hard to categorize Chinese (I imagine you're speaking about Mandarin?), Korean, and Japanese all together for a general statement. I have read some Japanese programming books. For programming, and IT in general, Japanese borrows heavily from English vocabulary for novel terms, along with using a lot of abbreviations which also come from English. So you will see sentences such as: "hoverイベント 要素にマウスが乗った時、…

Ok so sadly my Thai is not where it should be, but it also heavily uses borrowed English words, that it masterfully butchers. Thai language has only a fairly limited number of ending sounds and also usually needs consonsants attached to a vowel. For example so a master branch, would be a somethign like a masta brand, I'm guessing. Here's an example of some non-IT terms http://pickup-thai.com/loan-words-from-english/

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

#82

Post by simonebrunozzi »

What a fascinating question. I'm originally from Italy, studied CS in an Italian university and only briefly at UC Irvine (California). I've left Italy 12 years ago and worked for American corporations or startups since.

I am terrible at discussing CS in my native language. Even with fellow Italians, I stay with English as much as possible.

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

#83

Post by desyncr »

microtherion wrote: post #14

For my PhD thesis, I was required to write an abstract in my native language, German, and had a pretty hard time of it. On the other hand, I've experimented a bit with high school level CS teaching, and found that with sufficient preparation, it's fairly doable. I suspect that when we struggle to express a concept in our native language, we may have somewhat deceived ourselves in how clearly we expressed the concept…

Do you have some references on that phenomenon?

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

#84

Post by phreack »

Coming from Latin America I would have never imagined before this thread that so many large countries would not teach CS in their own languages, and would have to speak in English amongst themselves!

It's fascinating, over here we incorporate thousands of English words into the Spanish IT lingo, but while they can could roughly communicate in English, most people I know wouldn't be able to have a discussion entirely in English. As others have said, there's several literal translations for some concepts, but it feels a bit condescending/academic to use those instead of the English words in casual environments.

A fun quirk of this is that we turn many English verbs into Spanish versions of them (where verbs must end in -ar -er -or). Some examples: - to commit -> committear - to pull -> pullear - to deploy -> deployar

That last one is particularly fun because it turns the 'y' at the end into a consonant (sort of like if you said 'deployate'). And we do all this instinctively, for some reason it's what feels most natural!

A sad quirk is that we've also adopted the frustrating English tendency to turn _everything_ into acronyms, which always irks me.

Amazing thread!

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

#85

Post by jakecopp »

The comments here remind me how music notation has adopted Italian as the default language with all other musicians must follow.

> There are some Italian terms like 'tempo', 'adagio', 'allegretto' and 'rallentando' which are only used in the context of writing or reading music. But others, like 'concerto', 'piano', 'soprano' and 'opera' were so stylish that they have made their way from the original Italian into our everyday musical vocabulary.

https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/music-theory/why-it...

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

#86

Post by mmmBacon »

Barrin92 wrote: post #69

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.

At the turn of the 20th Century, German was the language of science. Annalen der Physik was THE preeminent journal of physics and where many of the important discoveries that laid the foundation for quantum mechanics and modern physics were published. Einstein published the theory of relativity in Annalen dear Physik for example.

Here’s an interesting article that talks about the decline of German language use in science. https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-10-06/how-did-english-becom...

>>>>And you have a set of people who don’t speak foreign languages,” said Gordin, “They’re comfortable in English, they read English, they can get by in English because the most exciting stuff in their mind is happening in English. So you end up with a very American-centric, and therefore very English-centric community of science after World War II.”

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

#87

Post by matz1 »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #35
sanxiyn wrote: 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…

>almost all of the adequately fresh information is in English

Thats because you know english, naturally you would look for english resources.

There are as many(probably more) fresh information in chinese too but if you don't know chinese you wouldn't aware of it.

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

#88

Post by marcosdumay »

kamyarg wrote: 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…

It's always mixed, there are some words people translate, some words they don't.

A more formal setup asks for more translations, what does make things really hard. One of the hardest parts of writing my master thesis was discovering the translation of "image matching" (for 3D reconstruction). But I got away with English just fine before I had to write it down.

Of course, just an year after that I was in a corporate-like environment (in the government) trying to discover the translation of "runway end turnaround area" for airports. It was still too formal to use English, but we could just settle this one by consensus.

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

#89

Post by axegon_ »

These days yes, mostly. Mind you, I studied abroad and when I graduated and first moved back, that really want the case. I remember in my first job, my tech lead explaining how I had to do something, and he said something along the lines of "so you take all of those and shove them into an array" in our native language (Bulgarian). I shaked my head in approval, having absolutely no clue what on earth an "array" was. I checked it in Google translate 5 minutes later and realized I'd have to learn a ton of terminology. Eventually I caught up more or less, though ~10 years later I still get surprised about some terms and expressions occasionally. I'm still far from being able to freely describe and explain stuff in academic terms in my language.
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