131–140 of 174 posts
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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 am a native German speaker and developer. Literally every resource I look up on the internet concerning my work I look up in English. I actually start thinking about my problems in English. When MDN shows me content in German the first thing I do is switch to English to lower the cognitive load. I can just speak for myself, but jumping back and forth between two languages is adding unnecessary cognitive load. I als…
For me part of the reason most people use English in CS boils down to the English textbooks being better.
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…
This is similar to what we do in the spoken languages in North Africa / Maghreb. You take a French or English verb and you just conjugate them the same way you'd do with native verbs. So, "I deployed" -> deployit (in Tunisian Arabic), "pull" -> pulli , "did you commit it" -> commitit-ha? . We study CS in French. Which itself, uses lots of English words in CS. I'm not sure if there is any country that studies it in Mo…
When I was in highschool, I got a gift of this Pascal programming book "الخوارزميات والبرمجة الانشائية بلغة باسكال" reading it felt very weird, but I still keep it for the novelty.
I'm Russian and Georgian native speaker. Short answer to your question is "NO", but I would not bother writing it, if not the long answer I really want to share. While languages I speak are not similar at all, I see the same behavior among my colleagues, whatever their native language is. They use IT specific English words mixed into their native language. What is even more interesting, is that these English words do…
I'm a English-native Russian learner, and most of my exposure to the phenomenon of English as the lingua franca of computer stuff was in college, where it was bizarre to hear the Chinese students discussing their (programming languages) project in Mandarin while dropping in "parser!", "tokenizer!", "scanner!" every fifth word.
Learning Russian I was taught that half the vocabulary was random words Pushkin borrowed from French. I then actually went to Russia and was bemused at the prevalence of odd English loanwords ("ксерокс" will forever be a favorite) despite knowing the linguistic processes that introduce them, and being doubly bemused at the adoption of English grammatical conventions (how can you name a homegrown chicken chain "Ростик’с"? HOW!?").
It hasn't stopped, and is now at the point where it's prevalent enough to be a tongue-in-cheek joke in pop music (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4h-WpSsXVw&t=1m57s). It's kind of amusing learning a language to then watch it transform by bits and pieces into some mishmash between your native language and whatever it was before, which was itself a mush of old languages cobbled together into something people actually speak nowadays, or thenadays, I suppose.
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?
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The languages themselves are no problem, you already use non-English for important programming constructs without thinking about it like !, ||, &&, etc., and have to explain their function in English upon first encounter. 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…
I am a (non-native) Mandarin Chinese speaker, and I'm essentially unable to have the most basic conversation about programming. No terms that I'm aware of are phonetic transfers (Chinese does that occasionally, but not often), they're all new terms, and I can't formulate a single sentence without having to look everything up. It's like having to relearn the language -- very frustrating! (Not saying they should be doi…
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…
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…
I’m (half) Italian and (as you might expect) we do much the same when we import terms from English: commit becomes commitare , debug becomes debugare , and so forth. There’s only three suffixes (‘ cogniugazioni ’) of verbs in Italian (- are , - ere , and - ire ) but the relative frequency decreases right-to-left across that list and indeed most verbs ‘imported’ from English fall into the first category. It’s particul…
Many terms we need daily seem to have no real native analogue; at least not one that wouldn’t sound as if you’re deliberately trying to engage in some form of Dadaist absurdity: file, record, monitor, mouse, record. Others have perfectly serviceable local alternatives: algoritmo, tastiera for keyboard, processore for processor, puntatore & cursore, memoria, archivio for storage (aside: by God does it annoy me when people who should know better speak of hard drives or SSDs having a certain amount of ‘memory’: it’s storage goddamnit!), sistema operativo, finestra for window...
It’s kind of a mixed bag.
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…
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Because most of the CS/CEng content is in English, not knowing english is a huge disadvantage. Now I am shocked that you are shocked that s/he is shocked.
Knowing English definitely is an advantage, but how big? If you’re not interested in an international careeer (many people aren’t), you have quality education available in your local language, and there’s a thriving local tech scene I don’t see why it has to be that much of a disadvantage. There are many other languages that are big and used by tens of millions of people. In most of those languages you can find all t…
You can of course find the answer in your native language also, but it will be less likely it exists, it will be harder to find, and less "peer-reviewed".