I speak fluent German - like a native. Only after 20 years in London I cannot participate in a hard- or software-related technical discussion in German, because I wasn't exposed to that milieu in a German-speaking environment.
And so I excpected something that maybe explains how you might say "inversion of control" or "edge/perimiter network" or "public key cryptography" or "tiers vs. layers" in German. My quest continues.
Even when I was a child, with no or very little education in English under my belt, the chapter "E/A-Anweisungen" in my trusty GW-BASIC manual confused me to no end. I'm pretty sure that I would have grasped the meaning of "IO".
Where those terms still rule unchallenged is in MS Excel formulas. All the function names are translated. When you are a native speaker but used to programming vocabulary, Excel expressions read like hieroglyphics: you can easily identify most of the symbols, but the semantics remain unknown.
They spend large minutes looking for where everything has gone.
And the beauty of trying to understand what log messages in German actually mean.
Tangent: stack (as in LIFO) is traditionally translated Keller instead of the much more literal Stapel, likely to avoid ambiguity between batch (also Stapel) and stack. One of the few ancient computer English translations that absolutely did make it into the 21st century is "Stapelverarbeitung". I think that this is because it sounds just as clumsy as the concept it is describing. When you say Stapelverarbeitung you can almost feel that stack of punched cards that you have never worked with if you are my generation.
...except that you still need to memorize or deduce the correct articles. Der Layer (ends in -er); die VM (die (virtuelle) Maschine); die Postgres-Database (die (Daten-)Bank); das Upgrade (probably because it's a verb turned into a noun, like das Aktualisieren?), etc. Fun!
For some reason, many recent open source tools are still translated into German word by word. I guess the volunteer translators feel like they're cheating when they use English terms?
I couldn't care less about the correct article (although I mostly guess correctly anyway). I think being understood is the real winner. As is seeking to understand, of course.
Translations are difficult. If you are talking or writing you just use the first word that comes to mind, but when you are translating it takes active effort to decide on where to stop. On top of that, with open source translations there is always a bit of an assumption (and self-fulfilling prophecy) that power users would stick to the original English and when you think of an audience that does not know the technical terms it feels like helping them if you forcibly translate (which might be a mistake).
It seems like there was an effort in the 80ies/90ies to have native German names for concepts in computer science, but today those just sound very dated.
Datenfernübertragung died with the 56k Modem ;)
The term "Keller" BTW is not a bad translation of "stack" but an original German term by one of the inventors of the stack: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stapelspeicher#Geschichte
Spreadsheet => Folha de cálculo (Portugal), Planilha Electrônica (Brasil)
You probably mean Blinklicht(er), actually used to describe flashing lights.
Ironically the German word for "blinkenlichten" is "Blinkenlights":
People do use English terms, but it's also very common that there exists a native word and people will use that. Calling computers "kompuutteri" would sound hilariously old-timey compared to "tietokone" (or "tietsikka"). The same goes for "telefooni" vs. "puhelin", though curiously enough I'm perfectly fine using both "pointteri" and "osoitin" when speaking about programming.
I guess part of it is because Finnish is not Germanic so direct loans sound bad... Often they get nativized so that eg a laptop in colloquial speech becomes "läppäri"
“Computer” is non-existent in Hungarian, we call it számitógép, built from the words számitás (to calculate) and gép (machine). Since most Hungarian words are constructed like that, it sounds completely native to the language.
I cringe whenever I hear English words mixed in with Hungarian ones, they sound completely out of place, which is probably not true for German.
I've never heard German words for any concepts like that outside of university.
You'll usually get by just pronouncing those words a bit more German or replacing the ones that are very close to German words with the German one (e.g. cryptography -> Kryptographie but "public key cryptography" -> Public Key Kryptographie). If you want to "pass" while speaking German but need to use English jargon, just use a slight German accent and nobody will bat an eye.
Fun fact: most Latin-based English words work in German as long as you pronounce them like a German would, at worst you'll just sound a bit stilted or old-fashioned.
Only those that were introduced from Latin texts (alongside all the ancient Greek we tend to confuse with Latin). Those that came from Latin via French are for when you need to cheat in the same way west of the Rhine.
On age old companies, you might have some hard time as many use proper German terms that seem foreign even to CS universtity students.
On modern companies, it is pretty much a mix of coloquial German and English terms.
Actually, I've noticed that I sometimes just use English words mixed with German in my day-to-day talking too because they come to mind more quickly. Probably ~10% of what I say when talking German is English (with German grammar of course).
I have to say I hate mixing languages. It makes me feel uneducated and a bit like a loss of identity. Especially German is really expressive and it shouldn't be a problem to make up the words needed to express yourself.