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Comment by looping__lui | Hacker News Reader

I feel that English probably is the most effective language for anything science/engineering/business related. It’s so much easier to express yourself in good and convincing and clear ways (plus as the lingua franca in many of those domains, there isn’t necessarily a great German translation). So I actually prefer having any conversations in these fields in English, even w/ German colleagues.

In Law though, nothing seems to beat the preciseness of the German language. It’s very good in expressing exactly what the relationships and rules should be. Some people love it from the “literalistic” point of view - but I just like the efficiency of the English language and the distinctive humor that a lot of english speaking authors put in their writings; so I can’t speak to that. The German language feels to me like it wasn’t made for science, engineering or fun but rather law and bureaucracy.

Just my personal two cents.

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German was not quite the lingua franca of mathematics, but something many mathematicians learned at least to some degree, before the World Wars. That's why so many German words have survived there (take eigen vector, for example).

Also Western philosophy had a slightly German-language bend.

I doubt there is a substantial body of science that can be expressed much better in English. It's probably a wash, with some words and concepts easier to express in this, and some in that.

Image processing, machine learning and computer vision come to my mind. How do you translate “Convolutional Neural Networks”, “back propagation”, “loss function”, “noise-contrastive learning”, “ Generative Adversarial Networks” in German? It’s not “just a few words” but you will essentially end up speaking German with mixing it 30% with “english words that bring the actual science and innovation across”.

No meaningful papers in these domains are published in German...

You could translate these as "faltendes neuronales Netzwerk", "Zurückübertragung", "Verlustfunktion", "Rauschkontrastlernen" and "generative Gegnernetze".

Of course most people don't do that, because they learned the terminology in English and there's no particular reason to invent a completely parallel set of made-up terms. But if there were such a reason (e.g. if English literacy were uncommon among German computer scientists) it could be done.

I have never in my life heard any of these words. They are poorly translated and unpronounceable.

Yes, you would not make up these words just for the sake of speaking in German. We are not in the 30s any longer.

But no person in its right mind would speak German with 30% of the words “borrowed from english” because “all the other advantages of the German language outweigh borrowing so many english words”.

I love how people are downvoting me in their evening frustration about their lives - but yeah, if you miss like all the relevant vocabulary in a language why would you state that communicating in it is “smart of efficient”? There is no inherent reason. English has -for many fields- the best vocabulary. The english language does not get lost in four line sentences so easily like the German language and it’s not made up of 80 character words.

Have any of you ever read a German paper or textbook on a topic? Its awful. I love english textbooks I love english papers.

Right, but that was not the issue. The issue was a language suited for rules and relations on the one hand, and a language of humor and expressiveness on the other.

Of course, today everyone publishes in English. And of course, many English words are used in German academia.

But there is no inherent property of the English language, why it is better suited to communicating topics in machine learning.

Then why don’t I hear people discussing it in German?

Why don't you hear people discussing in German on Hacker News? Is it because German is unsuitable for informal, everyday discussions?

What?

No, but I suppose you miss all the vocabulary you need to efficiently communicate about ML in German... Or why is it?

I don't know about that. Precision is something desirable in science and engineering.

My experience is quite the opposite anyways, I often felt, English sentences lacked clarity that you could have in a German sentence

Ironically, I concur :-)

That's why English works well for professional discussions: the ambiguity is a tool. The obvious case being 'you' and the implied level of formality, but also plenty other words/phrases have a similar effect.

In science or engineering? Like how?

I mean, like I said for contractual arrangements etc. German is more precise.

But I never found that the “English language was not precise enough” to convey something - unless it was a choice by the author.

> It’s so much easier to express yourself in good and convincing and clear ways (plus as the lingua franca in many of those domains, there isn’t necessarily a great German translation).

It’s easier to express because Englisch is _the_ lingua franca of those fields. It would have been a totally different case had some other language, say French or Mandarin had been at the forefront of scientific literature advancement and dissemination.

Yes. That was my point.

You miss 30% of the vocabulary, well, you won’t have a great conversation about a topic...

> It’s so much easier to express yourself in good and convincing and clear ways [in English]

A friend of mine was translator into English and French, and she said that it was easier to translate into French, because there was basically one way to say it. In English, there'd be many different options (mostly vocabulary substitutions, but not only), with slightly different connotations.

A pertinent aphorism I've come across (anyone know the source?):

"English is among the easiest languages to speak badly, but one of the most difficult to speak well."

That is not the point I was making. There are situations where this preciseness is utterly useful and required (e.g., law, literature) and cases where this isn’t the case (e.g., sciences).

I’d buy the english original book on any topic 100% of the time instead of a german alternative or its translation.

Ask any german university student in computer science or engineering or business - 9/10 prefer english textbooks.

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