Comment by Sandman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sandman | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I don't buy the language barrier argument. So what if there's little documentation in japanese, I don't see why these developers couldn't just learn the languages and frameworks by reading the documentation in english. Unless they don't speak english, and in that case, I'd say it's their own fault. I may come off as being arrogant now, but let's be honest here, english is the lingua franca of our profession and any self-respecting developer will have at least a basic grasp of the language. You really don't need to speak a language perfectly to be able to read the documentation and learn some new technology. Also, english is quite easy to learn compared to other languages (much simpler grammar than most of the other languages I know or know about) and with all the US/Brittish shows, sitcoms and movies around you almost cannot help but to practice it regularly. Unless they synchronize them in your country, in which case you're out of luck there, but still...

Btw, if anyone is wondering, I am not a native english speaker. But I did learn how to program by reading the books and documentation that were available in english. If I had waited for somebody to translate these to my language, I probably wouldn't know a thing about programming to this day.

Agreed. I'm a native Japanese speaker and learned English because I thought it was required to learn programming. And I had thought it was the norm until I met other Japanese professional programmers. Somehow they thought they were allowed to stay whining about not being able to get information from English resources.

Once I told the management to have them learn English because it's almost mandatory for a software engineer to understand English as much as an aspiring Go player would learn Japanese. But the management told me back it's _harsh_ to require them to learn anything more. Harsh? Huh?

That said, I found the need for technical books real, and translated several English books (including Programming Erlang) into Japanese. However I know this effort will not scale and these days I am inclined to abandon translation and tell them that English is just another tool you have to learn to survive.

But I'm guessing you are a native speaker of a language closely related to English. I'm willing to bet your attitude would be a lot less cavalier if the lingua franca of our profession was Japanese (or Turkish or Chinese or whatever).

Not really, croatian is my mother tongue, and that's a slavic language. But I admit, it would be a lot harder, I think, to keep this attitude if the language of our profession was a language more complicated than english. We can consider ourselves lucky in this regard.

Croatian is still fairly closely related to English, however, so that gives you an advantage over someone who speaks Chinese natively, which isn't related at all.

But you are right that within the Indo-European language family English does not seem to be one of the more complicated languages. Which might have something to do with its origins as a pidgin of French, Anglo-Saxon, Frisian and Danish.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com