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Comment by jhanschoo | Hacker News Reader

The languages themselves are no problem, you already use non-English for important programming constructs without thinking about it like !, ||, &&, etc., and have to explain their function in English upon first encounter.

CJK have different strategies for localizing technical terms. I don't know about Korean, but Japanese tends toward transliterating English terms whereas comparatively Chinese tends toward inventing calques.

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I am a (non-native) Mandarin Chinese speaker, and I'm essentially unable to have the most basic conversation about programming. No terms that I'm aware of are phonetic transfers (Chinese does that occasionally, but not often), they're all new terms, and I can't formulate a single sentence without having to look everything up. It's like having to relearn the language -- very frustrating!

(Not saying they should be doing it this way -- in a way I'm glad they are.)

In terms of general science and technology I find the Mandarin names more illuminating. English technical vocabulary tends toward coinages from Latin and Greek roots that obscures their intuitive meaning to high schoolers. e.g. the word "commutative property" in Mandarin is a plain-language "exchange rule", with no appeal to classical vocabulary.

To be fair, most of those "obscure" coinages in English were not so obscure when they were coined. Until rather recently, members of "academic society" were expected to know some degree of Latin and Greek.

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