
Ask HN: Is there a mismatch between Math in German and English? - k__
I had a bunch of math at university in Germany, but after I looked into functional programming at the level of Haskell, I felt completely lost.<p>Monad (Monade) seems to be a philosophical concept in German and Monoids have a completely different name (Halbgruppe -&gt; Semi Group)<p>Also, if I enter some terms into translators I don&#x27;t get meaningful translations at all.<p>Is there a mismatch or is it simply, that most mainstream media (google.com, leo.org, etc) don&#x27;t bother with such concepts and make them harder to find?
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Tomte
"Semi group" exists in English, too. Monoids are simply special semi groups.

I don't know what you're expecting. I certainly don't see a mismatch between
languages.

If you're confused by terminology, enter a term in the German Wikipedia and
click on "English". You'll see the equivalent lemma in English.

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k__
Thanks for the tip.

My procedure was simply entering these words into translators.

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CarolineW
Technical terms are often _faux amis_ [0] between languages. Just because this
technical term in this language looks like that technical term in that
language, it doesn't mean that they are the same thing.

Although they might be.

The same is true in natural languages. In English, "Preservatives" can be
added to jams, _etc.,_ but don't say in French that the jams you have are _"
sans préservatif"_[1] because that means something completely different.
Other, similar _faux amis_ are less amusing.

With regards Google Translate, you can try, but pretty much all of the
technical terms will be screwed up. Google Translate works by statistical
methods, and there just isn't enough material to make it work. In fact,
anything other than the simplest sentences will be translated badly, and the
only reason it works "well enough" is because of the astonishing native
language abilities of the human brain.

Translation is hard, language is weird.

</rant>

[0] French: "False Friends"

[1] Correct term is: _" sans conservateurs"_

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k__
Yes, so it's probably everything right with Math and my language skills suck,
haha.

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CarolineW
Probably most of the math is right, you're just (quite reasonably) expecting
something that turns out not to be true. Languages, both natural and
technical, evolve, and don't always converge.

You simply need to spend more time learning about, and then internalizing, the
mappings between languages, and sometimes the mappings are neither exact nor
precise.

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k__
Yes, I already knew that. But coming from a relative new field of computer
science, where most terms simply aren't translated into German and the English
terms are used, I probably expected something different.

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allendoerfer
Or they have been translated literally and stuck, even though there had been a
German word for it in the first place.

Example:

The computational _side effect_ is translated as _Seiteneffekt_ , which is a
word no sane person would use outside that context. It makes you think of an
effect that takes place on a sheet of paper ("Seite") or - when you just hear
it - some acoustic phenomenon involving strings of a guitar ("Saite"). Other
side effects are much rather called _Nebenwirkung, Nebeneffekt,
Begleiterscheinung_ , or something like that. You would not think of "side =
Seite" here. "On the side" would naturally be "nebenbei" or "nebenher", except
when it is literally "on his side" as in team, then "Seite" makes sense.

There are multiple other sometimes funny examples. The benefit of this is that
you create a more specific term, the downside is that you sound like an idiot
to normal people when using them.

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sold
"Monad" in English and "Monade" in German are the same, they can both mean the
functional programming concept or the philosophical concept. You can just
ignore the philosophical concept, it's not relevant to mathematics.

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mtmail
I'm still fascinated how the world 'billion' can have two meanings, depending
on language
[https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion)

