Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 174 posts

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

#111

Post by imedadel »

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…

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 Modern Standard Arabic and I can't think of a standard translation for the words above.

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

#112

Post by rglullis »

mnemonicsloth wrote: post #91
rglullis wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 simultaneousl…

What I meant is that some people simply don't speak English and still can be productive while working in tech. There is no reason to be "shocked" about it. That is all.

Whether they can learn or not is a different discussion. And I really do not want to get into some "who has it harder?" victimization game, but it surprises me that you don't see the exclusionary nature of expecting people to learn English to study and participate in discussions regarding Computer Science.

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

#113

Post by alessivs »

gus_massa wrote: post #99
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.

The alleged difficulty lies only in the mind.

To inline is to include (incluir) or insert (insertar), in a fashion that's compatible with the compiler optimization concept.

Debug, depurar.

Both have been in use in Spanish since at least the 80s.

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

#114

Post by rglullis »

viklove wrote: post #75
rglullis wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

Seems like you'd just be better off learning English so your ability to find help online isn't hamstrung.

So imagine a typical teenager from Brazil that is finishing his (very bad quality) public high-school and has some interest in technology. He likes to tinker with things, electronics which he can find books in Portuguese. He has access to a computer and manages to install Linux, wants to start about programming.

Do you really think that the proper advice you'd give to him is "Learn proper English first"? More likely than not, you are just killing his interest in learning and shooting down the best chance he would have to lift himself out of poverty.

Remind me to come back to this in 10 years when China surpasses the US in production of, say, AI Research. Let's see if HN will still be okay with the idea of "just go and learn Mandarin" to find stuff online.

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

#115

Post by yongjik »

sanxiyn wrote: post #34
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.

What a failure. Try non-awkward translation, instead of awkward translation! "smack of the lips" thing is a failure of awkwardness, not a failure of translation. In Korea "to click" is translated as "to press". Now, that wasn't difficult, was it?

Eh, Korea had its own share of awkward attempts. It's hard to predict which terms will be accepted.

E.g., in early 90's, some people tried to use daramjwi (literally, "squirrel") for mouse. I'm not sure what they were thinking - a (computer) mouse doesn't look like a squirrel at all.

The term didn't survive.

Even worse offender was the Hercules graphics card, which was widely popular at that time. I think the same group of people tried to "translate" it into cheonha jangsa (something like "the strongest man on earth") - because, you know, Hercules the son of Zeus was known to be the strongest man on earth! (Never mind Hercules was a brand name here.)

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

#116

Post by alessivs »

novok wrote: post #104
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…

So why would it feel awkward/academic to use translated versions for I'm guessing common words in spanish such as pull?

That one perception may be just cultural or regional. It may be just cool to be lazy, and emit an air of condescendence if one uses one's native language consistently.

Pullear, deployar are ridiculous and lazy.

For instance, deploy has its roots in the military term: to place and equip troops in a battlefield. The Spanish words desplegar (v.) and despliegue (n.) have existed for ages with identical meaning, and in common use in the 90s in IT.

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

#117

Post by mappu »

adontz wrote: post #105

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 star-struck every time I see the Georgian alphabet, those letters are beautiful.

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

#118

Post by mappu »

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

Stackoverflow doesn't have a Chinese version - what domestic site is popular there? (And how many questions does it have?)

I looked at Segmentfault (CN) but I can't see any total number of questions - but if I refresh StackOverflow the 5 most recent questions were all asked within the last 1 minute, whereas on SegmentFault the 5 most recent questions were asked within the last 20 minutes. Although it might be biased by the current timezone.

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

#119

Post by behnamoh »

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…

People on this thread usually use the Latin alphabet, but in Persian (and some other languages), the righting is from right to left, which is yet another barrier in using English terms in a text. I've had to switch languages constantly to write a message in Persian that would make sense. Doing the same in English would probably be much easier, but not everybody would be able to understand it and respond to it in English. Also, sometimes the platform doesn't even support mixture of RTL and LTR languages. For example, the following sentence is messed up (it's supposed to mean "an example of Linux-based Operating Systems")

    مثالی از سیستم عامل های مبتنی بر Linux
In Persian (Farsi), we usually take the English term and add a form of "kardan" (meaning "to do") to make a new Persian verb. For example, "commit kardan" (to commit), "commit kon" ([you must] commit), etc.

However, due to publishing rules, people have to use literal translations instead of the foreign ones in formal situations. Sometimes, those actually convey the same meaning as the English terms, but other times, they're just more confusing.

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

#120

Post by girzel »

jhanschoo wrote: post #63
cryptonector wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you deal with programming languages' being so based on English?

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 doing it this way -- in a way I'm glad they are.)

Post reply on HN