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Ask HN: Can you discuss CS in your native language?
134 points by widforss on June 1, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 168 comments
Yesterday I needed to message my CS teacher about an exam question, and discovered that I was unable to formulate my question in Swedish, so I opted to write the whole message in English instead. I don't want to share the message, since it is related to an exam, but it was about Iacono's working set structure.

Have your native languages incorporated CS terms to any usable level, or do you have to switch to English, in part or wholly, when the topic is discussed?




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!


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 particularly when we ‘re-import’ something that English actually imported from Latin or Latinate languages. For example, import itself: we have importare in Italian which actually means “to care about”. But of course we re-import it as meaning “to bring in” (either in economics, or in the Python sense), so it acquires a meaning that it doesn’t actually have in Italian, and we pronounce it differently by moving the stress from early in the word for our native meaning to late in the word (on the -are) for the ‘foreign’ meaning.

Esportare means “to export”. But of course we bring in “exportare” from English, which is a corruption of our “esportare”.

Since I’m half English too, out of courtesy I make a point of using the most Italian words possible, because slinging around English terms is snooty and a sign that one is showing off, and of course as a native English speaker I could do it better than most. So for most people it’s a computer, which gets pronounced something like com-pù-tèr”, whereas I make it a point of referring to it as a calcolatore (a “male calculator”, which is the native term for an arithmetic machine that can execute arbitrary streams of commands, whereas a calcolatrice is a “female calculator” that cannot be programmed, i.e. a calculator in English).


Correction: -are is by far the most frequent suffix, -ere intermediate, and -ire therefore the least frequent.

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.


I never realized that but we have exactly the same thing in French : three categories on verbs, the most regular and sensible is the first one and this is where all the imported words fall into: débugger, rebooter,...


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.


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.


I also studied CS in Tunisia, funny to see those expressions again.

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.


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.


We use "incluir" for something like #include <iostream.h> .


What I love about Spanish is how flexible the language is. You can mould it and adapt it to whatever you want and people would still understand you.


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.


Hmm, I may be misreading your comments in this thread but it sounds like you're not okay with languages simply... evolving?

You are aware that importing words is a thing, right? Even if equivalent words already exist. It's perfectly normal and even healthy for a language to do so.

To me, pullear and deployar are just a lot more clear and there's no ambiguity. "Desplegar" would not be very meaningful to me in the context of my work.

It's all about clarity in my mind and condescension really has nothing to do with it.


Tiny difference, in continental Spain deploy is translated as "desplegar"


Which is arguably a really solid translation.

“America deployed her armies” => “América desplegó sus ejércitos”.


brazilian here, we also do that in portuguese, for example, "I debugged" becomes "eu debuguei"...


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 in English. I notice all the time that people think they are more profound in a foreign language, when it's in fact precisely their lack of familiarity with that language that disguises the banality (A phenomenon also known as "quidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur").

Somewhat related, I see people cursing in foreign languages…


I suspect what you're saying could definitely be a phenomenon. However, in this case, I think it's just a matter of domain and context.

I speak both English and Spanish natively, however, I'm more comfortable in English when talking about e.g. technology and music. On the other hand, I'm more comfortable in Spanish when talking about math, feelings, etc.

As you can probably already tell, it's not like math and feelings are very related. It's just that I've probably been more exposed to those things in Spanish than in English. Same goes for technology and music topics, I've just been exposed to them in English a lot more than in Spanish.

Btw, I also had to write a dissertation in Spanish and I, too, had trouble with it, hah.


That's quite surprising to me! Because it used to be the case that some reading ability in German was required for the serious engineer or scientist.

From memory from around 1850 up to 1920s.

(I'm not that old heh, but I know people who have done serious historical research in engineering that required German)


At least in robotics a lot of good current research is being published in German.


Do you have some references on that phenomenon?


Nah, purely anecdotal.


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...


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 example, "feeding data to some service", there is a widely used "veri" for "data", and there is also translation of "to feed", "beslemek".

Sometimes when I hear "Servise veri besliyoruz"(We are feeding data to the service) I immediately think of someone feeding some kind of animal.

So in my experience talking to Turkish developers, if they are from a "corporate" environment, they are more likely to use these native words but people involved in startups etc. usually say "Servise Data feedliyoruz". (Generalising a lot here, I am sure they are a lot of exceptions)

Fun fact: Turkish actually derived a word for "to compute" to avoid confusing it with "to calculate", Although it is not used at all: "bermek". while the "calculating" is "hesaplamak".

In case you are interested(Turkish): http://user.ceng.metu.edu.tr/~ucoluk/yazin/berimsel_bir_dene...


While "branch" is loaned in Korea, "implementation" is never loaned, the translation 구현 completely satisfied that demand. In my experience, there are better and worse translations of terms, and adoption mostly depends on quality of translation.

Edit: Additional explanation. 구현 roughly means "realization", which I think is a better term than even "implementation" itself. Word "implementation" in non-programming context is translated as 시행. In Korean, "implementing an interface" sounds wrong, compared to "realizing an interface".


It's old-fashioned, but branch does have a Korean equivalent: 분기 (literally "branching", or a single branch separating into multiple branches). E.g., 무조건 분기 (unconditional branch), 조건 분기 (conditional branch), 분기문 (branch statement).

(I suspect it was imported from Japanese 分岐.)


Is that branch as in CPU instructions? We(edit: in Japanese) refer to the Git feature as ブランチ(buranchi) and CPU instructions as 分岐命令(bunki meirei). Old CS folks calls computers as 計算機 but normally it’s コンピュータ.

Sounds like whether a word is loaned or created/translated varies?


Ah yes it's CPU instruction. I'm not sure if a git branch is ever called 분기 - I guess most people use the English "branch" for it.


That article is a bit inconsistent. If "ber" is the root word for "compute", then "computing" should be translated as "berleme", not "berimleme" (similar to "hesap -> hesaplama" vs "calculate -> calculation").


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.


I can speak several African languages and a few ethnic dialects(fairly common thing)indigenous to West Africa, but I consider myself, a native English speaker because I was educated entirely in English(It's the official language of my motherland).

With that being said, due to the high nature of abstraction when treating CS concepts, you'd be hard-pressed to find vocabulary built into an African language or dialect that could support any meaningful conversation on a CS topic. A few governments looked into it, but it's almost impossible to implement anything in local languages. Transliterating or translating directly from English doesn't generally work. Same for the francophone countries, and the majority of sub-Saharan Africa(including the Portuguese-speaking islands I've been to). You can have conversations in those dialects but you'll need to mix them up with English, and therefore, CS is mainly taught in English.

However, in North Africa and the League of Arab states, I've witnessed CS courses that were taught in Arabic, but the instructor had to default to English words to explain programming concept. It's usually a hilarious mix-match of English and Arabic that could be defined as a language on its own.


I'm Flemish, so I speak Dutch. Since it's a small language, at university, most advanced courses used English (or French) books. There are a lot of concepts I cannot even start to explain in Dutch. I just don't have the vocabulary.

I also was really shocked to learn later that there are programmers who don't speak English: I once interviewed a French developer who didn't know any English. He explained me that all his courses were in French, so there's no need/opportunity.


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-English source code some times but that's rare and feels weird). English is not my native language but I'm glad it unites ~99% of the industry and the science.


> 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 nothing that says that if you participate in HN in English that you must always write in English. Back when I used to collaborate on a blog, we made a point of writing in Portuguese and I tried to avoid anglicisms and loan words whenever possible. My rationale was simple: I was much younger and most of the things I wrote would never be of interest to any thought-leader or something to advance the state of the art. It could however be of interest for those in Brazil that had some interest in programming, and I didn't want the language to be yet-another-barrier for them.


> 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 English that you must always write in English.

Obviously. Yet I would never use any other language to name a variable or a function. I would also use English and only English to write a manual for a library I might invent as that would mean most of the developers would be able to read it immediately without me having to waste my time on writing in different languages.


> I know of the localized versions of StackOverflow but they hardly are worth visiting.

Portuguese is my native english but I never use the portuguese version of StackOverflow. The english version content is just so much better that I don't bother looking at the portuguese one.

Wikipedia is an interesting case as well, since it's also available in several languages. I tend to favour the english version when looking for content that is somewhat culturally neutral.

> It's not an issue, it's awesome.

If you're a native english speaker it's really awesome. If you aren't and don't speak the language it's yet another barrier for learning. Even greater if developers that speak your language decide to dismiss it and adopt english at all times. I believe that's the point "rglullis" was trying to make.


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 shocked that there are non-English speakers working with tech is no different than being shocked by blind programmers.


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.


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.


I think it's only fair for people with disabilities to be offended when someone that's not been through the difficulties that they've been through make use of their disabilities for comparisons in making a point.

"mnemonicsloth" point is valid. And he's only asking for more consideration, and in a polite manner afaic.


Naming a variable? Definitely. Writing a library? Very few people do it, even less do it for global market. Shitposting on reddit? Maybe; you have fewer options with English, because anglosphere is very monopolized. Speaking English in sound? Absolutely retarded.


People considering writing in different languages to be waste of time is part of the problem.


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.


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 them to help more people in their situation. Again better than nothing.


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.


>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.


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 the books, courses, and conversations you need to take up computering.


From my personal experience, best example is "You see an exception/error, search google, click the first stackoverflow link".

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".


Google search is engineered to show most relevant result for you. Of course it wouldn't show you other languages result.

There are tons of resources in other languages but you wouldn't aware of it, you wouldn't even know how to look for it because you don't know the language.


Then you learn that .net throws localized exceptions, word by word machine translated.


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 remember back in the 90s Heise's CT magazine used to have really good articles (only in German). The prose is very heavily German with relatively few English words.

Looks like they're still around today.

https://www.heise.de/ct/

In my experience, Germans are less hung up about borrowing English words as-is, probably because they're both Germanic languages.

Speakers of Romance languages (French for instance) are more hesitant. The French generally insist on localizing borrowed terms -- l'ordinateur (computer), logiciel (software), etc. And these are actually used in real life.


As someone who grew up bilingual German/English this is really hard for me, I end up getting really confused while speaking (in German) about technical to-I a because I’m never sure which words have been “eingedeutscht” and which haven’t.

So I try to do in English and end up speaking Denglish instead. :). A personal failing of course, but amusing.


ahhahahahah perfect definition :) my native language is portuguese, but i'm working in english on the German speaking part of Switzerland (where they speak swiss german). Trying to learn german and distinguish when use the english words within a German sentence is like a lottery :D


"Nein, Committe niemals in den Master."*

Nice to see I can even practice German in HN.

* Needless to say, excuse my (possibly) horrible German.


That sentence is perfectly fine

The "niemals" make it sound like you care very very deeply about me not committing to the master (and your are right of course)


Committe lieber in den Ast (I'm sure nobody use that for branch, right?)


They don't... Sorry


Some might use „Zweig“.


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 also never ever heard someone talk about the "Meisterzweig" in a Git repository.


I also immediately switch to the English version of any documentation. Worst offender here is the MS knowledge base with it’s really bad auto-translations.

For me part of the reason most people use English in CS boils down to the English textbooks being better.


Probably because github and stackoverflow write them in English ;)

Also there is no need to translate technical lingo if everybody understands it. More general IT terms are translated sometimes (e.g. hard disk = Festplatte, keyboard = tastatur). I'm sure a linguist could explain why it happens in some cases and not in others.


Croatian here. In the circles I run, everyone says the english variant "branch", even though it could be straightforwardly translated (to "grana"). The reason is the following - when I hear "branch" it evokes the version control concept in my mind. When I hear "grana" it evokes the part of the tree or bush. So, we use "branch".

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.


It strikes me that by reserving “grana” for branch of a tree, and “branch” for source code branch, you have created a more precise language than English for these concepts.


For those specifically: Because those are the names the tools use, and it'd be annoying to talk using one word, turn around and type a different word in the terminal.

Generally, abstract or mathematical concepts tend to have German words, but even those aren't always used. Things specific to tools/technologies typically don't, and few bother coming up with German equivalents. And German doesn't mind integrating other words, even mixing them in compound nouns with German ones.


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.


Well, these have become technical terms sufficiently abstracted from their general sense that people have no problems borrowing the terminology from a different language. In fact English is a worse offender when it comes to these things, e.g. hydrogen for waterstuff.


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.


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 joke one, so most of it is abandoned now and mostly English terms are used.


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.


I see there was no shortage of creative self-proclaimed linguists in these parts of the lands behind the iron curtain as well.

Our expression for "mouse" was quite byzantine: "manipulator stołowo-kulotoczny" (table sphererolling manipulator?). This just begs for a TLA like "MSK".


Korean translation of "mouse" was "squirrel", although ultimately it lost to a loan. I can't imagine why anyone thought that long-winded translation in Polish would stick.

Squirrel was chosen because it is considered cute, but mouse is considered dirty. I think that kind of consideration of association is important in translation.


> Squirrel was chosen because it is considered cute, but mouse is considered dirty.

That's a great example of the difference between translation and localization.


I am not sure why that failed, but that's probably because I don't get Croatian nuances. In Korea disk is translated as "storage device" and it stuck. In general, you can make non-silly translation instead of silly translation, and non-silly translations do stick.


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.)


I guess sharing (roughly) the same alphabet it was easier to adopt the English terms.

Then again some words, like "sterownik"(can be understood as "someone who steers" - driver) remain in use to this day.


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 not replace native words, but become domain specific language.

So, for instance, for Georgian.

Task is "ამოცანა" (amotsana)

Done is "დამთავრებული" (damt'avrebuli)

So one and the same person will tell you ამოცანა დავამთავრე (amostana davamt'avre) when speaking about some task in general, but when it's about task in Jira, it becomes "ტასკი დავდანე" ([task]i dav[done]e)

For Russian it's almost the same.

Fixing is "исправлять" (ispravliat) or "чинить" (chinit)

Bug is "ошибка" (oshibka)

But nobody is "исправляет ошибки" (ispravliaet oshibki) when it's about IT. Living person would say "фиксить баги" ([fix]it [bug]i). But nobody would say "фиксить" (fixit) about a car.

You may notice that English words grow suffixes and prefixed to adopt to grammar of another language. It's not the language you may find in books, but it is how people around me communicate.


A rather belated comment in HN timescales, but whatever.

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.


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


Aww thanks. I mean... მადლობა :-)

მე ყოველთვის მიხარია როცა გამომდის ქართული კულტურის გაზიარება პოზიტიურ კონტექსტში.


Persian native here. Every now and then I tell myself it's time to start translating some of the books that interest me and that haven't been translated already, but then I find myself reading some related books (translated to Persian/Farsi) and after seeing some of the ridiculous terms used for the translations, I just give-up and postpone the entire idea for some uncertain future.

I personally have to guess some of the meanings and for some other words/terms I need a Persian/English dictionary (not even sure if it exists or that I can find anything up-to-date) to figure out what the translator meant.

We have an "Academy of Persian Language and Literature" which comes up with "Persian" terms/words for most things but a lot of them will almost hardly ever be used even on public television which is (almost) entirely operated by the government itself.

I remember 11 years ago when I attempted to register a company there which the name had to be made-up of a minimum of 3 words and that I had chosen "digital" as one. They rejected the my request and asked me to use the equivalent term which wasn't even Persian and came from Arabic and that no-one even uses today. At the same time I remember there was a national competition about "digital" media with ads running on every tv channel using the exact word "digital" in them... Sent an email to the president of that academy which comes up with these translations and rules (also chairman of the parliament at that time) expressing my feeling, obviously never got a response nor anything changed. I never registered their proposed version as it would've just been a laughing stock had I gone with it.


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、外れた時に指定した処理を行う" which uses literal "hover" with borrowed イベント(ibento:event) and borrowed マウス (mausu:mouse) all within one short sentence. You will very often find sentences made up mostly of borrowed words when describing a new term and its context.

Korean also borrows a lot of terms from English, but I feel I run into it to a lesser degree than Japanese.

For example: "여담으로 외국 오라클 홈페이지에 들어가면 Java SE 11버전까지 나와있지만 8버전을 사용하는 이유는 버전이 높을수록 새로운 기능들을 제공하지만 안정성이나 버그 등의 문제가 있기 때문에 8버전을 사용하였습니다", where you see borrowed words "오라클 홈페이지" (orakeul hompeiji:Oracle Homepage), "버전" (beojeon:Version), "버그" (beogeu:Bug) along with literal English "Java SE 11". So it also has a lot of borrowed words, but they're more spread out through the actual sentences.

I do not know either traditional or simplified Chinese well enough to comment on that. But from talking with the native speakers I know or work with, it seems like Mandarin does not directly borrow as much English as Korean or Japanese.

Between the 3 you mentioned, I feel Japanese would probably have the hardest time trying to describe CS in its native language without using borrowed words, because a lot of words are no longer thought of as "borrowed" since they're so frequently used. I can not think of any good words to use as replacements that would not sound archaic or forced.


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/


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 calques.


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.)


In terms of general science and technology I find the Mandarin names more illuminating. English technical vocabulary tends toward coinages from Latin and Greek roots that obscures their intuitive meaning to high schoolers. e.g. the word "commutative property" in Mandarin is a plain-language "exchange rule", with no appeal to classical vocabulary.


To be fair, most of those "obscure" coinages in English were not so obscure when they were coined. Until rather recently, members of "academic society" were expected to know some degree of Latin and Greek.


I do not see programming language as English. Sure it may use alphabet and borrow some english word but to me it still hardly english.


Sure, but there's quite a few keywords in English. And then there are so many APIs and so much source code with symbols that consist of English words.


> I do not see programming language as English. Sure it may use alphabet and borrow some english word but to me it still hardly english.

Assembly language was invented and created in english to make it easier for english speaking developers to program. Nobody wants to program machine code.

Then higher level languages were invented to make it easier for english speaking developers to program. Nobody wants to write assembly code.

If java, javascript, C#, C, C++, etc aren't english language programming languages, then what language is it? Spanish? Japanese? Swedish?


>If java, javascript, C#, C, C++, etc aren't english language programming languages, then what language is it?

What languages? Its a language in its own right. Its a programming language. Specifically java, javascript, C#, C, C++ language.


You are being deceptive here. The original point is "How do you deal with programming languages' being so based on English?"

Nobody is saying that C or C# is the english language. Of course C and C# are programming languages. You aren't saying anything of importance here. But it is based on the english language using english words to help english speakers write programs.

I already gave you the history of the development of computer programming languages.

"Assembly language was invented and created in english to make it easier for english speaking developers to program. Nobody wants to program machine code.

Then higher level languages were invented to make it easier for english speaking developers to program. Nobody wants to write assembly code."

If you disagree then go read the AT&T or Intel manuals and tell me what language the syntax was written in. Go read the C grammar/syntax or the standard library, what natural language are they written in?

Chinese? Russian? Swedish?


(In Japanese) For beginners to medium level programmers, there are more than enough learning materials (online, books) in the language. We also have the Japanese words for most of CS terms such as object-oriented programming.


AFAIK the Japanese term for object-oriented programming is オブジェクト指向プログラミング (object shikou programming). They only translated the "oriented" part, which is a very generic term and not by any means technical.


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.


I can recall in 1998 I was studying in Germany, taking a semester break from my CS studies. For the fun of it, I checked out the books being used by the CS program - all the textbooks were in English, and I then learned that in that program, most of the classes themselves were conducted in English as well. I know since then that English has become common in courses in many universities in Germany, but at the time it was just a sign of things to come. As other commenters have expressed - it's a vocabulary problem. If there isn't an accepted translation into another language, than the English term will stand (assuming it is the originating language for the concept).


I studied CS from 2011 to 2017 in Germany. Generally all the CS terms are in English, while a lot of the theory (everything math related) or Phyiscs is taught in German. The more you progress into in-depth courses (e.g. master seminars, later lectures on database management) it is more likely to have English lectures, materials, etc.

Generally I would say you discuss CS with other Germans in German. You just treat it like any other professional terminology like medical jargon or Biology.


We used German for everything in my undergrad courses. Germany seems to have its own proud CS culture, haha.

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 guess the main issue is that languages outside of English generally don't have equivalent words for all of CS terms. I always have trouble explaining what I do (software engineering) in French without resorting to using English words, just because most words don't exist in French, or they don't mean exactly what you mean.

This reminds me that I can't stand people coding in languages other than English. Variable names/comments in French? No thanks.


It’s also a matter of habit. We are just too used to English words even when French ones exist. Go try and read Principes d’Implantation (sic) de Scheme et Lisp (the original Lisp In Small Pieces): pure unadulterated French and, to me, a constant struggle as I have to translate expressions to English!


Are you from France ?

In Canada (Québec) we are often using French words while discussing CS. I've noticed that French immigrants are also using a lot of English words even in random day-to-day words.

We called it "L'anglais de France" (France's English) [1]

[1] https://lactualite.com/culture/langlais-de-france/


These would drive you crazy then :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_...


I believe this website could be of some help: bitoduc.fr


As a fellow swede, I don't feel any compelling need to switch languages for discussing CS topics. On the contrary I'm rather sick of speaking other peoples languages after many years abroad and in international organizations. I try to use Swedish translation of concepts, when there are natural and intelligible ones available.

If there isn't a good direct translation available, just force a bit of swedish morphology onto the english root and everything flows. In some ways this makes our language richer and more specific than the one we borrow from. For us "mejl" is unambigous, whereas "mail" in english is not.

As a bonus, given an appropriate context, version control in Swedish is a cornucopia of innuendo.


I often use English CS terms prefixed/suffixed for Russian inflection embedded in a grammatically correct Russian sentence. (Russian is very flexible at adopting foreign roots within in its grammatical framework.)

There are "official" Russian translations of most CS terminology, but they often feel too long, too formal for casual conversation, or sometimes even too ambiguous.


This is a common theme in this thread, but I opine using English loanwords in Russian sentences IS using Russian, not using English. I am not sure why anyone thinks otherwise.

English loanwords in Korean are Korean words, not English words. They get Korean affixes. For example, methods are called 메소드 in Korean, but only as a programming term. Methods are otherwise translated as 방법. Therefore, word "method" in English and word "메소드" in Korean are completely different words, even if they share the origin and pronunciation. English word have normal non-programming meaning, Korean word does not.


Heh, this is fun. I learned a lot about functional programming while studying in Germany, so my first exposure to a lot of words was German. But they are mostly small adaptations of the English terms (monad == die Monade) anyway.

Fun fact: the professor taught the whole lecture in German but wrote definitions in English on the board (while simultaneously speaking German).


I found that a lot of theoretical CS terms, especially the ones established before the 60s/70s will still use the German terminology. Or if you talk about algorithms, language theory, etc.

Compare that to newer concepts like distributed computing, HTML, etc. ⇨ Using English terminology


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.”


I had another question, somewhat unrelated - how do you do naming if you're programming? In German you can just build a long word without spaces in between, so do you still do camel/snake casing to split them up?


At some point in the past, a few programming languages would try to be localized. I faintly remember Visual Basic using German names for the functions? Also I think SAP/ABAP was German at first. So when you write WENN X>LAENGE(Y) DANN you'd be using German variables, because it fits the programming language. Today I would expect all variables be english and comments be German at best. If I'd see code with German variables I'd just assume it was a beginner.


I've actually worked at more foreign firms than German one's so I may not be the ideal person to answer but when I worked on code that uses German naming people would usually use cases or underscores/hyphens like they do in English. It's just not very readable to use longer German compound words.

That said I think German names are relatively rare outside of old code. Most people just adopt straight up English terms.


What about naming variables, classes, files, etc.?


Almost always English unless German domain-specific terms. Very rare exceptions, typically in some custom business application one person wrote.


please see my comment above. All English today unles you are a Beginner.


My mother tongue is Malagasy, the official language of Madagascar alongside French.

Discussing CS or any other scientific matters in that language at least in my opinion is theoretically possible as there is a book on the Java programming language written in Malagasy. I have made some attempts myself trying to explain Python on the Malagasy Wikibooks [1] and on the Malagasy Wikipedia as well [2].

So yes, formally it _is_ possible. There is quite an extensive vocabulary pertaining to mathematics [3] as well, most of which having been crafted in the 70s and 80s as part of a nationwide effort to use Malagasy academically. The beauty of it is that they consist of native words as well as "malagasized" words.

In practice, sadly, it never happens. All university courses are taught in French, if not in English for the most advanced ones. And no company that I've heard of use Malagasy as a formal working language :(

[1] https://mg.wikibooks.org/wiki/Python

[2] https://mg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solosaina

[3] http://kajy.blogspot.com/2011/04/ireo-voambolana-matematika-...


A resounding "nope" for me. Not because my native language lacks the vocabulary, but rather because I only learned CS in English and because Hong Kong.

My mother tongue is Cantonese, but I was schooled for the better part of my life in Montreal, Canada. So when it comes to anything academic, I can only communicate in English or French. I learned Software Engineering at Concordia University, which is English-speaking.

I now live and work in Hong Kong, but Hong Kong being Hong Kong, we still mostly use English verbs and nouns for anything IT, even though the rest of the sentence could be in Cantonese. e.g. we would say "我將啲change commit咗啦，push埋上GitHub個repo度啦。"

The above sentence would mean "I've already committed the changes, and even pushed them to the repo on GitHub."

In my mother tongue, of course we have all the properly translated words for the above:

- change: 修改 or 改動

- commit: 提交

- push: 推

- (versioning) repo: 版本庫

We even have nouns for queues (隊列), linked lists (連接表), stacks (盞), etc.

We just never use them except outside of academic literature in Chinese.

About the only exception is the word for a generic "computer", which is "電腦" (literally "electric brain") in full or just "腦" (“brain") in short. E.g. ”你部腦呢？" ("Where is your comp?")


I am a native Sinhalese, and I can speak Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) and Tamil.

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.


>> "Download", for example, is literally translated to a word that doubles as taking something down via a crane

As an only English speaker, I dont see any problem with that or understand why it would be funny. To transfer a pile of material down to the ground via crane seems like a good metaphor for transferring a pile of data down from the cloud.


In Tamil, lot of CS terms are already translated but nobody uses that in speaking form. And they are properly translated in websites and mobile apps too.


Swede here. Never felt hindered by Swedish but with very few exceptions domain-specific terms will be English words (resulting in beautiful Swenglish/svengelska).

“Najs refactor, men kan du rebasa dina commits innan vi mergar till masterbranchen?”

(Written documentation, commit messages etc will always be in English though)

I saw your post on the same topic on Kodapor and I think it’s just a matter of you having had way more exposure in CS through English and therefore being more fluent in English in those contexts. There’s nothing in the Swedish language that would make it less powerful than English, as long as you’re willing to borrow vocabulary. The medical field has been doing this with latin for ages - loads of Latin words but nobody’s actually speaking Latin.

There are a few words that still feel natural to translate: Kompilator (compiler), kluster (cluster), minne (memory), binär (binary), etc. But for the most part it just feels forced and confusing to resist mixing in foreign words.


English is not that foreign though, it is also Germanic.


In Russia people don't switch to English to discuss CS, but the whole CS jargon is stuffed with loanwords from English. It normally goes well, Russian is quite flexible with adapting foreign words to its own grammar.

What was painful for me is writing about CS in the university (master thesis, some papers to local journals etc). In Russia you are not allowed to write your university contributions in English, apparently because some of your older supervisors will be uncomfortable with reading it. Also you can't use jargon, because university is a serious business, everything should sound very scientific. So I had to invent my own translations of all the terms of interest, and then put the English word in parentheses, so that reader has at least a slightest chance to understand what I'm writing about.


Yes, and I think English native speakers have more trouble discussing CS because they have to share the common and CS lexicon in the same language.

We can simply take what we want from English and incorporate it to our languages as specialized terms just as they do with Latin and Greek. I see this as a privilege.


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.


We have a publicly accessible dictionary online for CS terms (as well as generalized IT terms) in Icelandic but more often then not, people have no idea what I am talking about if I even attempt to use any of them in any type of communication.

Most if not all Icelandic terms in the CS vocabulary are created from our own langue (through combination of other words or by generating new ones) rather then adopting them from foreign language.

This makes the usage of them rather limited in such a small society, so most people in the CS community aren't even exposed to them.

Page is accessible at https://tos.sky.is


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.


I think it’s because the level of abstraction with CS is so high, that it’s very hard to communicate these ideas without having a shared vocabulary. This happens to be English for most of the world.


I grew up in Germany, but have been in the US for close to a decade now and all my technical education has been here. I have tried sending technical emails in German, but it's usually an absolute disaster. I have no Frome of reference for how to actually express things correctly. I also find my non-technical written German to have suffered quite a bit. Spoken word is fine, but writing is a bit tough. I guess I just didn't do any of that for a good ten years, so it got a bit rusty.


Me too, I got my engineering degree in Germany in 92 but moved to the US right after. At this point I really struggle to communicate anything technical in German and even while I lived there CS lingo was notoriously mixed.


India;

CS or mostly any other higher education is English.

It is really hard to translate things into many languages we have here (Especially South India). If done, they will be mostly Sanskrit terms that are still quite harder to understand.

I think everything being in English is a virtue because of seemless interop with the Internet (which is mostly English).

Even when technical topics are conversed in native languages, the terms are mostly English.


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


It's a big problem in the three nationalist east Asian countries, Japan, Korea and now less so China. As well as Germany. They still insist to invent their own terms and stick to it. It's sometimes very hard to find out what they really mean, esp. if they refuse to tell you the common English term. China got much better recently, you see a big difference to Korea and Japan. Koreans and Germans at least speak a lot of english, but in Japan it's extremely hard if they would not use so many imported terms. Which helps. Germans even refuse that and come up with their own silly superlong monster words for simple terms.


When discussing things with coworkers for example, all or almost all CS terminology is in English, but those get incorporated in otherwise Dutch text. Grammar, non-CS-specific vocabulary is all in Dutch.

Comments and variable names in code are all in English.


I have no trouble discussing it concepts in Swedish. As long as you accept some creative translations you can find perfectly fine Swedish words. And if you can't, just invent new ones. I.e "Reverted the last change set because of strange exceptions." -> "Återställde senaste ändringen pga konstiga undantag." "Please rebase the branch to the master branch before sending a pull request." -> "Se till så att spåret utgår från huvudspåret innan du begär spårhämtning." Not a literal translation but it doesn't have to be.


In Israel, some people with technological army background or academic background, use Hebrew terms for CS. In the industry though (especially in the startup scene) English terms are more commonly used. There is a hybrid of English terms with Hebrew morphology. For example: "To merge" becomes "Le-marge-ge" (למרג׳ג׳) even though there is a Hebrew word for this action "Le-mazeg" (למזג). But as far as I'm aware studies for BCS are done mostly in Hebrew.


I can, and it feels normal to discuss CS in my native language which is French, which already includes many English words. Imho the downside of not using English lies in the keyboard layout. Many programs are designed to make sense with an English Layout e.g Vim. But writing accents with the US international Layout is a PITA (compared to French Layout), I ended up being a "bilingual" typist.


Actually I can't. It would just sound so strange to me talking about branches, trees, traversal, cache lines, threads, forking and killing processes and so in all the non-English languages that I speak or understand.

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.


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.


My university tried to teach in German. Complete insanity.

We where puzzling way too long what "Reihung" or "Rahmenwerk" mean.


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.


Most of CS terms in Russian are loanwords from English with the same meaning but slightly different pronunciation.


No, it is impossible to talk about CS in Greek. I must ALWAYS switch to English.


As an Albanian, no. Discussing more complex CS topics is not pleasant at all.


Swede as well and practically my whole career have been abroad. Some year ago I was interviewed by another Swede and we opted to do it In English.

I’d probably be able to, but I’d have to fall back on English at points.


You can do it in Spanish, but there's a lot of vocabulary that either sounds really weird when translated or there's not a translation. So we use English words mixed in the discourse.


Asere, te voy a tirar este PR a QA a ver si funciona, apruevalo for favor.


eso es :D


I speak fluent Korean & learned CS in English. And nope. I can't discuss CS in Korean.

I don't know many terms and they are utterly confusing.

Korean terms for CS sounds too academic.


Russian/Ukrainian: almost impossible. It sounds like english anyway, as more than every other word is english.


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


It's really difficult for me and I hate to deal with code that uses native variable names.

Constantly Switching from English keywords, English resources and code samples on the Internet to local variable names adds a lot of cognitive load.

Some people do it though especially my co-workers with a background in mechanical or electrical engineering.


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


I do, and Python 3's support for Unicode identifiers was a welcome addition. It's a great help for readability.


It would be pretty much impossible to talk about CS in Polish as even the universities teach CS classes in English.


Yes, I can and do discuss computer science in Korean.


My native language is spanish, and while I obviously have discussions with colleagues in spanish we constantly weave english terms in our talks.

In fact, friends and girlfriends outside the industry have always laughed at the fact that when I talk with coworkers half the words we use are in english.

Why? Well, it's NOT only a vocabulary problem as others have said. Some terms are untranslatable, yes, but also every good documentation or resource you come across will be in english, code itself is in english, and so I spend 90% of my day THINKING in english. We end up using english expressions that have nothing to do with programming during regular conversation.




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