Comment by phreack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phreack | Hacker News Reader

Coming from Latin America I would have never imagined before this thread that so many large countries would not teach CS in their own languages, and would have to speak in English amongst themselves!

It's fascinating, over here we incorporate thousands of English words into the Spanish IT lingo, but while they can could roughly communicate in English, most people I know wouldn't be able to have a discussion entirely in English. As others have said, there's several literal translations for some concepts, but it feels a bit condescending/academic to use those instead of the English words in casual environments.

A fun quirk of this is that we turn many English verbs into Spanish versions of them (where verbs must end in -ar -er -or). Some examples: - to commit -> committear - to pull -> pullear - to deploy -> deployar

That last one is particularly fun because it turns the 'y' at the end into a consonant (sort of like if you said 'deployate'). And we do all this instinctively, for some reason it's what feels most natural!

A sad quirk is that we've also adopted the frustrating English tendency to turn _everything_ into acronyms, which always irks me.

Amazing thread!

I’m (half) Italian and (as you might expect) we do much the same when we import terms from English: commit becomes commitare, debug becomes debugare, and so forth. There’s only three suffixes (‘cogniugazioni’) of verbs in Italian (-are, -ere, and -ire) but the relative frequency decreases right-to-left across that list and indeed most verbs ‘imported’ from English fall into the first category.

It’s particularly when we ‘re-import’ something that English actually imported from Latin or Latinate languages. For example, import itself: we have importare in Italian which actually means “to care about”. But of course we re-import it as meaning “to bring in” (either in economics, or in the Python sense), so it acquires a meaning that it doesn’t actually have in Italian, and we pronounce it differently by moving the stress from early in the word for our native meaning to late in the word (on the -are) for the ‘foreign’ meaning.

Esportare means “to export”. But of course we bring in “exportare” from English, which is a corruption of our “esportare”.

Since I’m half English too, out of courtesy I make a point of using the most Italian words possible, because slinging around English terms is snooty and a sign that one is showing off, and of course as a native English speaker I could do it better than most. So for most people it’s a computer, which gets pronounced something like com-pù-tèr”, whereas I make it a point of referring to it as a calcolatore (a “male calculator”, which is the native term for an arithmetic machine that can execute arbitrary streams of commands, whereas a calcolatrice is a “female calculator” that cannot be programmed, i.e. a calculator in English).

Correction: -are is by far the most frequent suffix, -ere intermediate, and -ire therefore the least frequent.

Many terms we need daily seem to have no real native analogue; at least not one that wouldn’t sound as if you’re deliberately trying to engage in some form of Dadaist absurdity: file, record, monitor, mouse, record. Others have perfectly serviceable local alternatives: algoritmo, tastiera for keyboard, processore for processor, puntatore & cursore, memoria, archivio for storage (aside: by God does it annoy me when people who should know better speak of hard drives or SSDs having a certain amount of ‘memory’: it’s storage goddamnit!), sistema operativo, finestra for window...

It’s kind of a mixed bag.

I never realized that but we have exactly the same thing in French : three categories on verbs, the most regular and sensible is the first one and this is where all the imported words fall into: débugger, rebooter,...

People on this thread usually use the Latin alphabet, but in Persian (and some other languages), the righting is from right to left, which is yet another barrier in using English terms in a text. I've had to switch languages constantly to write a message in Persian that would make sense. Doing the same in English would probably be much easier, but not everybody would be able to understand it and respond to it in English. Also, sometimes the platform doesn't even support mixture of RTL and LTR languages. For example, the following sentence is messed up (it's supposed to mean "an example of Linux-based Operating Systems")

    مثالی از سیستم عامل های مبتنی بر Linux

In Persian (Farsi), we usually take the English term and add a form of "kardan" (meaning "to do") to make a new Persian verb. For example, "commit kardan" (to commit), "commit kon" ([you must] commit), etc.

However, due to publishing rules, people have to use literal translations instead of the foreign ones in formal situations. Sometimes, those actually convey the same meaning as the English terms, but other times, they're just more confusing.

This is similar to what we do in the spoken languages in North Africa / Maghreb. You take a French or English verb and you just conjugate them the same way you'd do with native verbs. So, "I deployed" -> deployit (in Tunisian Arabic), "pull" -> pulli, "did you commit it" -> commitit-ha?.

We study CS in French. Which itself, uses lots of English words in CS. I'm not sure if there is any country that studies it in Modern Standard Arabic and I can't think of a standard translation for the words above.

I also studied CS in Tunisia, funny to see those expressions again.

When I was in highschool, I got a gift of this Pascal programming book "الخوارزميات والبرمجة الانشائية بلغة باسكال" reading it felt very weird, but I still keep it for the novelty.

My favorite examples are inlining -> inlinear and debugging -> debuguear They are very difficult to translate.

The alleged difficulty lies only in the mind.

To inline is to include (incluir) or insert (insertar), in a fashion that's compatible with the compiler optimization concept.

Debug, depurar.

Both have been in use in Spanish since at least the 80s.

We use "incluir" for something like #include <iostream.h> .

What I love about Spanish is how flexible the language is. You can mould it and adapt it to whatever you want and people would still understand you.

So why would it feel awkward/academic to use translated versions for I'm guessing common words in spanish such as pull?

That one perception may be just cultural or regional. It may be just cool to be lazy, and emit an air of condescendence if one uses one's native language consistently.

Pullear, deployar are ridiculous and lazy.

For instance, deploy has its roots in the military term: to place and equip troops in a battlefield. The Spanish words desplegar (v.) and despliegue (n.) have existed for ages with identical meaning, and in common use in the 90s in IT.

Hmm, I may be misreading your comments in this thread but it sounds like you're not okay with languages simply... evolving?

You are aware that importing words is a thing, right? Even if equivalent words already exist. It's perfectly normal and even healthy for a language to do so.

To me, pullear and deployar are just a lot more clear and there's no ambiguity. "Desplegar" would not be very meaningful to me in the context of my work.

It's all about clarity in my mind and condescension really has nothing to do with it.

Tiny difference, in continental Spain deploy is translated as "desplegar"

Which is arguably a really solid translation.

“America deployed her armies” => “América desplegó sus ejércitos”.

brazilian here, we also do that in portuguese, for example, "I debugged" becomes "eu debuguei"...

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