As a German I use browsers in English because when I have to google things it's much easier and you don't need to translate back and forth in your head. Also I prefer technical documentation such as on Microsoft's developer pages or AWS in English. It's just so much easier with the lingua franca.
It's true that in the past there were much more German words in "IT" starting with EDV (Elektronische Datenverarbeitung, essentially that is IT). Favorites are "Datensichtgerät" (Monitor) with companies like Siemens (Nixdorf) or NCR that actually built Datenverarbeitungsgeräte.
I agree that English as lingua franca of computing makes sense, especially when communicating with non-(German)-native speakers. But one important reason why German is no longer viable for this is the terrible state of translation from English to German. Instead of using the "established" German terms, English terms are usually translated word-by-word to German without context, either by machine translation, or bad human translators who don't have a technological background (for instance for a long time, "link time code generation" was called "Link Zeitcode Generierung" in MSVC's German documentation, which doesn't have anything to do with LTCG even though it is correct German and a (mostly) correct word-by-word translation of the English term).
And instead of this butchering of the fine German engineering language, just switching to English is indeed the better alternative (and less painful).
The upside is that English comprehension correlates extremely well with technical ability for non-graybeards. Curiously german hiring managers haven't caught onto this at all, though that might be because they themselves largely lack the required language skills to test candidates for this.
I held onto my former job for another couple of years longer than I had expected precisely because of the fine, German engineering language.
It turned out that a supplier of a critical subcomponent in some of the systems we were designing and building, had terrific German-language documentation.
The English docs? Not quite as great, packed with ambiguities which simply weren't there in the originals.
Seeing as I was the only one on the team who could read German almost fluently, I simply pulled the 'Who's going to read the docs if I am let go?' card during every downsizing process for years. It worked until someone realized we hadn't supplied any systems with that particular component in it for years and I, alas, had typed up excellent documentation for our service department, covering their needs.
Just for clarification, this says "Link Timecode Generation" where it's supposed to be "Link-time Code-generation"?
I always assumed English-German MT must be somehow serviceable, I wonder if that had been true but limited to its syntax and did not apply to vocabulary, or if German MT is just as useless but German computer users are just patient.
I honestly find it bizarre that this isn't one of the problems we instantly solved with LLMs.
Can't we "just" train a model with a big corpus of English, a big corpus of German, and a big corpus of human-translated Rosetta-Stone-like "annotated with translation" texts — and out will pop a "bilingual" language model that can do translation as fluently as a human could?
Do we just not have the right training data available to make this happen?
Even as a kid still going through that phase where English lessons at school consist of very simple descriptions of family life that add some new words each week, I felt betrayed by GW BASIC documention referring to some concept with the cryptic letters "E/A". When I realized that they were talking about "I/O", translated as Eingabe/Ausgabe, suddenly it all made sense.
There really needs to be some way for language preferences to include quality in some way. No, I probably don't want an English dub of something Asian when there's also a German dub. But I certainly also don't want some machine or lowest bidder translation that only exists to serve people with no foreign language skill at all (or that's not even remotely as good as the company that commissioned the translation thinks.
> There really needs to be some way for language preferences to include quality in some way.
In theory, there is. It's called content negotiation. With your browser request you already send a list of preferred languages, like "Accept-Language: da, en-gb;q=0.8, en;q=0.7". RFC9110 states that such a quality/weight is assigned to different representations of a resource.
So all the server needs to do is multiply their quality with your preference and return the one with the highest value.
So the technology for that is already in place. It just isn't done.
I think what the GP is describing isn't about client-server negotiation, though, but rather something that happens purely client-side for already-delivered resources, within e.g. the system for loading the right subtitle track embedded into a playing video.
AFAIK, there's no standard for allowing client-side media-playback frameworks to probe language preferences with quality values out of the browser they're running in. The navigator.languages property (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/l...) doesn't expose qvalues for some reason.
And even if there was, there's no way, in any media container format I know of, of annotating subtitle tracks with quality values — so there's no way of saying that a given track really sucks and should be deprioritized relative to the user's preference ordering, but still used if there's no other choice.
Same here. I love the creativity (and am impressed by it) it takes to invent new German words for things, even though I agree that it is impractical for the reason you pointed out.
Sadly, terms like "Klapprechner" for "laptop" or "Verklemmung" for "deadlock" never caught on.
This reminds me of the time I worked for a local telecommunications company and wrote software to interface with EWSD (Elektronisches Wählsystem Digital) switches. Honestly, working with telecommunications systems was the best time I had in my entire career.
I think we are a pretty small minority. Even Germans that are very fluent in English tend to use everything in German. And for that matter, though my sample size is far smaller there, so seem other countries. The few French Canadians I know all have their software in French.
I’m the only one of my friends I know who has everything set to English, some of them even watch German dubbed shows and movies. And that’s despite most of them being fluent in English.
This is true, but in French Canada it’s a point of pride to do everything in French. I think if your kids cannot speak English at all you get a merit badge and higher social status.
I don’t believe it’s quite the same in Germany
Dubbing is awful (and awful for learning a language) - eg Arnold doesn't ever sound like Arnold; people's voices don't always match their physique but voice is a very large part of someones/ a character personality.
Regarding documentation: my pet peeve is Google’s developer docs which default to showing docs in your account language with no way to change that. It would be fine if the translation was decent, but Google insists on using their awful machine translation and I would much rather just see the docs in English. But there’s no way to set that as the default as far as I could tell.
It's kinda sad that we have to use US keyboard layouts as well, to make us of all the keyboard shortcuts targeting it. Best example being the slash chars, which are not dedicated keys, so any shortcuts envolving them don't work.
I feel like in German, you can tell someone a name of tool or other device and they will instantly understand what it is. Translate “Skill Saw” to German and it is completely lost. That being said English has a lot of short form hacks that make communication, faster…
My pet peeve in English terminology is the very word "computer". It should have always been called something like "the mathematical machine", computation is just one of them! The French l'ordinateur is much better.
I always thought that, apart from moving bits around, computation (in the sense of performing calculations, like the people that used to be called "computers" before) is the only thing a computer actually does. It just so happens that the computations have many practical applications and results.
I don't quite understand the versatility of "ordinateur" that you mention. Maybe it's because I only know a little bit of French (and a tiny speck of Latin), but it sounds like it refers to something that puts things in order, like sorting. And that seems to be only a subset of what computation can do.
In short, I'm wondering how my interpretation of these words differs from yours.
My cousin in Germany is doing a 1-year long IT schooling course (going from how a PC works, how Win and Linux work, Shell/PS scripting to python and AWS) and the course material has all the technical terms in German: "Rechner", "Speicher", Ordner", "Betriebssystem", instead of Computer, Memory, Folder, Operating system.
Almost nothing from the course material is in English, which was shocking to me as if you're searching online for solutions to issues or learning new concepts, you can't expect in your career to only Google things in German and find answers in German, but you'll have to know to use everything in English to broader your search and knowledge base, so forcing all the candidates and materials in German feels like an unnecessary crippling.
So despite the new clothing, Germany is still a conservative digital dinosaur underneath, pretending to be cool and modern. "How do you do fellow Kinder?"[1]
"Rechner" and "Computer" are interchangeable and probably used equally frequently, as are "Hauptspeicher" and "RAM", etc. Some words do seem to be mainly referred to by their German names ("Betriebssystem", "Datenbank"), while for many others, I'm not aware of any German equivalent in common usage ("event sourcing", "operations", "pull/merge request", "branch", ...).
Sometimes, in university courses I've seen German names for things I had only ever heard the English term of. I suspect almost nobody in the industry actually uses these German terms.
So, not everything is in German. I guess it's probably mostly the stuff that's been around a long time that has acquired a German name, but newer tech is typically referred to by English terminology.
I also agree with my sibling commentor that dismissing a culture because they don't exclusively use English terminology is silly. The German language certainly didn't stop Niklaus Wirth (who was from Switzerland and spoke German) from winning the Turing Award.
I have a degree in CS, from a Polish university, and virtually all the course material was in Polish. That's a legal requirement, since I signed up for a degree taught in Polish, and I can't be expected to speak English, even though I would be useless in real life if I didn't. An English version would be available, but it would probably be painful, considering how bad some of the teachers are at short phrases, let alone a semester's worth of lectures.
Similarly, all my direct coworkers speak Polish, and that's the language we use to talk about technical matters. We do use English words randomly, and our code (comments and variables) and docs are in English, but nobody is complaining about people using their native language.
I also have a degree in CS from a Polish university, but my degree was actually taught in English.
I had a pretty good understanding of CS before I started college, so I assumed that a degree in English would be better because of how prevalent English is in this field. I... was wrong.
Most professors were not great at speaking the language. Funnily enough, the average student, whether Polish or otherwise, was far better at it than the average professor. Most of the course materials we had were direct translations of their Polish equivalents, usually done by the professors themselves, despite the fact that far higher-quality materials in English were available on the internet. Some of the translations were subtly wrong, one professor consistently used compresion[sic] when he actually meant conversion and twice when he meant times. I've even seen words, error messages and documentation snippets that were translated to Polish in the original materials, and then (badly) translated back to English.
You're confusing two deferent things. I was talking about the language of technical IT terms, not which language you use at the course/school/university as of course that will almost always be the local language out of legal requirements.
In your Polish courses do you use translated Polish words for all the IT technical terms, or the original English ones?
It's a mix. General terms will be usually in Polish, in some older textbooks or other materials you can encounter really different terms that relate to different era.
Things like "Zbiór danych" (or just "zbiór") instead of "plik" - which translate to "data set" Vs "file"
>Using one’s native language as opposed to English is sufficient to make one a “conservative digital dinosaur”?
That's just my opinion based on personal experience, which can't be right or wrong because like I said, it's an opinion and not a fact.
From what I saw, yes it kinda is. I'm from eastern Europe originally, and here we learn CS and everything IT related directly in English, even though we have our own words for the technical terms, nobody's using them and we just default to the English words. If you go to the Nordics or everything north of Netherlands including them, everyone is schooled in English as well when it comes to IT.
It's mostly Austria, Germany, France and few other conservative countries who insist on using their local language for IT terms out of national pride or something, as using too much English is seen as an defeat/attack on their culture.
I can't agree. It's not about national pride, IMO, but about the organic development of the language. Some of these terms date back to the pre-war period, think of the Zuse-1 era.
Many IT words that used to be German were replaced by English words if they were shorter ("Direktzugriffsspeicher" => RAM) or easier to pronounce ("Hauptplatine" => Mainboard), and e.g. OS is a common abbreviation in German for "Betriebssystem" because it is shorter - but "operating system" is not, so why switch? There is no upside, so the language didn't evolve that way.
Use Windows or Linux in German, directories are called "Ordner" - why would you teach "folder" instead if the course is in German?
The US is the only country that insists on using systems of units that nobody else is using and that hasn't stopped it from becoming an economical juggernaut.
> That's just my opinion based on personal experience, which can't be right or wrong
I think yours is actually a (theoretically) falsifiable theory about cause and effect, so it can be right or wrong.
>who insist on using their local language for IT terms out of national pride or something
We'are a nation with a IT sector, not an IT sector that happens to hve a nation attached to it. Using English is fine, but education and business in Germany must be available to everyone in German and that's why it needs to be taught. We can speak more than one language, so making sure that our culture and language is preserved and speaking English aren't mutually exlusive.
There are many European countries, smaller ones especially, seriously at risk of losing their language and culture.
> It's mostly Austria, Germany, France and few other conservative countries who insist on using their local language for IT terms out of national pride or something, as using too much English is seen as an defeat/attack on their culture.
I think it is more awareness of the fortune of cultural diversity.
No offense but that's just American centrism at play. Lingua franca of computing is English, everyone should just learn "the human language" and it'll save everyone's times, computer runs in English, everything should translate clean from English, etc etc.
There's nothing wrong in using local languages. Speaking not-English is not bad. Many go for English because there's a lot of money to chase in the market, not because it's objectively right by some truth of this universe.
> My cousin in Germany is doing a 1-year long IT schooling course (going from how a PC works, how Win and Linux work, Shell/PS scripting to python and AWS) and the course material has all the technical terms in German: "Rechner", "Speicher", Ordner", "Betriebssystem", instead of Computer, Memory, Folder, Operating system.
Those are established popular terms with nearly half a century of usage. Newer or less popular terms are often just English.
> Almost nothing from the course material is in English, which was shocking to me
Maybe you don't see it? What about shell, cloud, webservice, etc. Is there something about router, switch, smartphone, microservice, AI? Ai is a pretty funny case, as there is a German term for it (KI), but in the new hype now, it's barely used at all, even in academics.
> So despite the new clothing, Germany is still a conservative digital dinosaur underneath
It's not conservative to have your own culture and history.
KI is used by the media, including by a kids focused radio station, Toggo Radio, that my kids love.
They have well written news segments where it comes up relatively frequently at the moment. I don't have cause to talk much about AI to my kids yet so time will tell which terminology they adopt.
>It's not conservative to have your own culture and history.
Relax, nobody's saying to take your beer and Lederhosen away, but why force your own translations to established industry technical words onto students?
It just creates confusion and hampers further self learning and cooperation as the lingua franca of IT is Englisch anyway.
TBH, if a student lacks the brain capacity to translate German technical terms to English in a course that's held in German language then I would question the fitness of said student for a technical job in general.
It's not a job, it's a course. Not everyone attending such a course is fluent bilingual.
But that's beside the point.
The original point we if the vast majority of the technical IT jargon is English anyway why do you also need to change them to German for a course or industry? Why not keep those words in English?
I don't think you understand how languages work. Nobody sat down and "decided" to use German words instead of English ones (maybe that's what happened with the Académie Française, but that's a different topic). Those German terms have been in use for decades.
Are you going to force UK speakers to say truck, fall and cookie, too?
Devils advocate, but I code using US spelling for variable names, and avoid using Imperial terms to US English speakers because if they can't wrap their minds around me being in the southern hemisphere and my summer being their winter, they won't be able to cope with "capsicum".
> Are you going to force UK speakers to say truck, fall and cookie, too?
No, but it's pretty typical to see Brits talk about datacenters, computer programs and sometimes even catalogs, as opposed to datacentres, computer programmes and catalogues.
I have one memory from university just burned into my head and will most likely never forget it. During a course on operating systems, I got increasingly confused by the prof talking about "Speicherkacheln", which translates to "memory tiles" - i.e. small tiles you'd glue to a wall in a bathroom.
It took me a hilarious amount of time to realize he was talking about mem pages. Many things about that lecture fell into place once that clicked.
Later on, especially the newer courses, had no qualms about just keeping english terms around, or at least made sure to include the english terms though. All of the interesting research happened internationally anyway.
So despite the new clothing, Germany is still a conservative digital dinosaur underneath, pretending to be cool and modern. "How do you do fellow Kinder?"[1]
It's funny to me how German speakers thing it's cool and modern to use English words throughout their German. But when I as a native English speaker read Denglish, it looks about as cool as socks w/ sandals.
Siemens S7-300/400 PLCs manuals used german words (Akku, Doppelwort ..). Also AWL (something like Assembler for PLCs) used german mnemonic by default.
It just changed with the new S7-1200/1500 TIA generation. Now they use english words everywhere and AWL mnemonic is english by default.
German actually used to make heavy use of French loan words for everyday objects. There was a very intentional shift in replacing loan words with Germanic words around the 1930s (really starting in the 1920s I think), I think you can imagine why that gained traction.
So that's something to keep in mind with qualifications like that. It's noteworthy that university-level formal computer science courses still make heavy use of "German" words for lots of concepts which causes a lot of headaches when coming from or moving to international (i.e. English) sources, especially for things like algorithms and data structures or programming language concepts (e.g. pointers, stack, loops).
I feel like closing that loop was actually bad for innovation. When we designed analog tubes, there could be some exciting piece to make/invent.
Now everything is programmable and we get stuck on “why” or “what” we are trying to make before we even start.
A bit like computer software, no one just messes around to make pong or hello world anymore, they are spending 6 months white boarding the thing before they write any code. (Or maybe they aren’t, but in hardware we do)
So … nothing super amazing in my sleep anymore. Waking up in the middle of the night to design a circuit to provide a constant -5vdc for a 555 timer while the rest of the circuit is +\- something or another, just doesn’t happen anymore.
People absolutely mess around with software, probably more than ever before. Maybe that doesn’t happen as much with hardware, but I’d be sad if it didn’t happen up here.
