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

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

#91

Post by mnemonicsloth » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 2:09 AM UTC

rglullis wrote: post #66

qwerty456127 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think we are talking about two different things. You are talking about uniformity and standardization as being a good thing. I am talking about accepting that input from people in other languages as a way to increase accessibility. 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 shoc…

That's pretty insensitive.

Non-English speakers have the option to learn English. It takes a couple of years, but I know a lot of people who have done it. And I can't think of a better investment.

Disabled people do not have the choice to make their disabilities go away. We have to learn to live with it. Compared to what I've already done to try to make my life normal, learning Russian, Urdu and Swahili simultaneously would be much easier.

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

#92

Post by desyncr » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 2:10 AM UTC

The conversation is quite mixed up in Startups where I'm from. In enterprise it's mostly native language. Depending on where you work one or the other will sound strange to you.

I'll put some examples on my native language: Spanish (I'm from Argentina).

Enterprise: "Pensamos desplegar a producción este Sábado". Startup: "Pensamos deployar a prod este Sábado" (deployar => to deploy).

In the startup scene there are lot of English terms commonly used: "logueado" (to be logged in), "rollbackear" (to rollback), feature, endpoint, queries, cache, "checkear" (to check). Some of them are used to sound cool, other just because it's easier.

Lately I'm trying to stop mixing things up and I notice it brings a certain deep to my understanding of things. As if something is lost in translation.

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

#93

Post by marcosdumay » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 2:11 AM UTC

divbzero wrote: post #33

For those who discuss CS in their native languages, how many of you also name variables using your native language too?

There is a problem here, in that some times the business concepts do not exist in English.

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

#94

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 2:16 AM UTC

phreack wrote: post #84

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…

[deleted]

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

#95

Post by crispgm » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 2:16 AM UTC

CS in Chinese is mostly discussed in Chinese language, though we also like to use some English word. But trust me, it is at most 5% or even less. And it’s not rare to read article all in Chinese. And there are even programming languages in Chinese.

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

#96

Post by sneak » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 2:20 AM UTC

wishinghand wrote: post #28

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’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.

I think younger people (who mostly speak english as well) are less concerned about borrowing or code switching, whereas older people (who may have lower levels of english skills) may have wanted to stick to all-German, resulting in such backporting as “hereunderladen”.

People like to use the terms/style they are most familiar with. (See also: how über/ueber turned into “uber” in english.)

I think the age of the term and the age of the speaker matter a lot.

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

#97

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 2:22 AM UTC

Nope, same problem. One issue I had was that I converted a lot of English terms into "italianized" (I'm from Italy) terms, where the word would be still English but with some suffix to change the attributes of the word, that are in italian. This was even more problematic because now you needed to know both English and Italian to understand what I was saying. A teacher did complain about it.

The majority of the books I was reading on the topic were written in English so the conversion did take a lot of effort.

I decided to just use English if the context is CS (well, now my job).

One big problem is that software developers in Italy write code in Italian.

I figured out early the reasons for not doing so, but this wasn't shared. I'm in an English speaking country now, so I never solved the problem effectively. Or I did, since I just use English everywhere at work

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

#98

Post by kube-system » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 2:24 AM UTC

jhanschoo wrote: post #60

tomca32 wrote: 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…

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.

They were funny to many native English speakers in the 90's too.

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

#99

Post by gus_massa » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 2:35 AM UTC

phreack wrote: post #84

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…

My favorite examples are inlining -> inlinear and debugging -> debuguear They are very difficult to translate.

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

#100

Post by hnthrowaway90 » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 2:36 AM UTC

I speak Indonesian and used to work in Jakarta. Discussions usually used Indonesian language, but jargon and technical terms were always in English. Some terms were just Indonesian-ised English words (like aplikasi - which I’m sure most English speakers could guess the meaning of). I found other terms did have proper Indonesian words, but they were super esoteric and never used.