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Comment by usrusr | Hacker News Reader

You say it exactly as you wrote, thankfully we have stopped translating that kind of term. Translations are only found at the extreme edges of the formality spectrum: in very formal writing, you use whatever is defined in the glossary of your organisation, and informal chitchat might occasionally be spiced up with ridiculous translations spontaneously made up on the spot.

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.

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> You say it exactly as you wrote

...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?

Thanks for that and yes you're right. I think this isn't so critical though. My (French) girlfriend speaks German, with terrible grammar - but people understand her. I wish my French was as good...

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.

"Das Layer", for me, 100%. But I can't give a reason.

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).

Man, as a native German I hate this obsession with german naming english words. Disruptive becomes "erschütternd" which is a bad translation, or how do you translate "tech-stack"? Technologie Haufen? I solve this by speaking denglish, but sometimes my fellow Germans who are less into the tech lingo complain about that. I really hate it when germans try to germanize international english words.

I find quite funny how my German collegues get lost when their beloved IDE happens to be configured by IT for German.

They spend large minutes looking for where everything has gone.

And the beauty of trying to understand what log messages in German actually mean.

It is Technologie-Haufen or Technologiehaufen in correct grammar ;) See: deppenleerzeichen.de

Technologiehaufen sounds refreshingly honest if what you are referring to is the usual tangled mess of tools hotwired together from the repositories, and not the carefully vetted selection of neatly interlocking components people dream of when they say "tech stack". The latter might be called Basistechnologiekompisition which did not even exist in the Google index until now. If you insisted on making a direct translation, you should at least go with Stapel, not Haufen.

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.

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