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Comment by hengheng | Hacker News Reader

I love German engineering jargon. They (correctly) wrote Moduln instead of 'Module' that is so common nowadays. Mutterplatine feels forced but I'll let it pass. Some words for which there are no direct equivalents they took from English (like Strobe), some are just as bad and contrived as the English word (Aussprung for Escape).

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It is very weird. But in the old days you got German translated books.

I've read most of my programming books in English as most of the online resources were in English. Reading a German book about C++ with "Vorlagen". Didn't know what they were talking about unti I've used a dictionary and found out that "Vorlagen" are "templates". Was pretty funny that it was easier for me to read programming books in English than in my mother tongue.

The same goes for me - I can say I learned English by reading tons of documentation and tutorials over the years. And because of strange out-of-the-world translation I also set the language of all my systems to English. If I ever get a problem, I have the right words to google for right in front of me and can profit from a far larger pool of solutions.

Yes! The German contribution to computing history gets overlooked. History is written by the winners, so the history of computing is American, and us Brits get miffed when Turing, Bletchley Park, the Colossus, Atlas at Manchester are ignored. There should be more recognition for Konrad Zuse [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse

Speaking of German technical jargon, one thing that bothered me probably more than it should have was that in my Norwegian-German wordbook, "computer" ("datamaskin" in Norwegian) was translated as "festplatte". Obviously "festplatte" would mean "harddrive", not "computer".

Motherboard - Mutterbrett is ok i'd say, even Platine goes well.

I think "Hauptplatine" is the most common parlance - Just as mainboard/motherboard is somewat exchangeable in english.

backplane with integrated crossbar switch = Rückenebene mit integrierten Querstangenschalter

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