
Ask HN: Can you discuss CS in your native language? - widforss
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&#x27;t want to share the message, since it is related to an exam, but it was about Iacono&#x27;s working set structure.<p>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?
======
phreack
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!

~~~
qubex
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).

~~~
qubex
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.

------
microtherion
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…

~~~
emmelaich
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)

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

------
jakecopp
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...](https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/music-theory/why-italian-
words-in-music-notation/)

------
kamyarg
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...](http://user.ceng.metu.edu.tr/~ucoluk/yazin/berimsel_bir_deneme.html)

~~~
sanxiyn
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".

~~~
yongjik
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.)

~~~
numpad0
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?

~~~
yongjik
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.

------
elorm
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.

------
toolslive
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.

~~~
sanxiyn
Why are you shocked? In fact I am shocked you are shocked.

~~~
qwerty456127
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.

~~~
rglullis
> StackOverflow is in English

 _cough_ _cough_

\- [https://pt.stackoverflow.com/](https://pt.stackoverflow.com/)

\- [https://ru.stackoverflow.com/](https://ru.stackoverflow.com/)

\- [https://es.stackoverflow.com/](https://es.stackoverflow.com/)

\- [https://jp.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.

~~~
qwerty456127
> 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.

~~~
rglullis
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.

~~~
mnemonicsloth
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.

~~~
rglullis
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.

~~~
tcgv
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.

------
Vespasian
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)

~~~
wishinghand
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.

~~~
dschuessler
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.

~~~
pintxo
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.

------
Tade0
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.

~~~
tomca32
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.

~~~
jhanschoo
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.

~~~
kube-system
They were funny to many native English speakers in the 90's too.

------
adontz
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.

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

~~~
adontz
Aww thanks. I mean... მადლობა :-)

მე ყოველთვის მიხარია როცა გამომდის ქართული კულტურის გაზიარება პოზიტიურ
კონტექსტში.

------
n-i-m-a
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.

------
resouer
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.

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

~~~
matz1
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.

~~~
dntbnmpls
> 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?

~~~
matz1
>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.

~~~
dntbnmpls
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?

------
desyncr
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.

------
poulsbohemian
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).

~~~
leipert
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.

------
k__
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.

------
mxz3000
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.

~~~
cgrand-net
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!

------
aucontraire
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.

------
tetromino_
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.

~~~
sanxiyn
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.

------
tekknolagi
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).

~~~
leipert
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

------
Barrin92
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.

~~~
sk0g
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?

~~~
soonnow
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.

------
otagekki
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](https://mg.wikibooks.org/wiki/Python)

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

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

------
k_sze
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?")

------
Ayesh
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.

~~~
phkahler
>> "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.

------
Legogris
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.

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

------
oytis
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.

------
okaleniuk
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.

------
axegon_
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.

------
MrDresden
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](https://tos.sky.is)

------
crispgm
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.

------
rubatuga
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.

------
KenoFischer
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.

~~~
zwieback
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.

------
entha_saava
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.

------
Fire-Dragon-DoL
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

------
rurban
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.

------
roelschroeven
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.

------
bjourne
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.

------
iddan
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.

------
RMPR
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.

------
rdtsc
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.

------
hnthrowaway90
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.

------
j-pb
My university tried to teach in German. Complete insanity.

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

------
simonebrunozzi
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.

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

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

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

------
wingerlang
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.

------
feiss
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.

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

~~~
feiss
eso es :D

------
dance2die
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.

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

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

~~~
Vespasian
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.

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

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

------
slezica
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.

