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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Is IA something different from AI? Or maybe just the French version ("intelligence artificielle" I imagine...)

My feeling is that a lot of Meta's AI/ML work actually ties into the AR/VR long-term dream. How do you make the so-called metaverse alive? By having people design it themselves. They're not going to do that in Maya, that's for sure. But if they could create virtual spaces and virtual people with Holodeck-style natural language instructions...

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I apologize, my French accent broke into the wild.

Yes, it's totally AI, and IA is the French version :)

To complete the joke, Information Architure (IA) = Architecture de l'Information (AI).

I've been known to mix both when switching context between Spanish and English

Programmers in particular tend to overuse anglicisms, and often I end up mentally doing spanglish in my head,

"Necesito este value" "Este command deberia hacer esto" "Este iterator va a hacer $something a este object"

Haha, I noticed my coworkers do that when they're speaking Hindi or Chinese too. All the key words are in English, so you step in and say "Oh, you guys are talking about that iterator bug?" and they're shocked: "Wow, you speak Chinese?"

Chinese, unlike Japanese or Korean, lacks a consistent phonetic mechanism for "importing" foreign words. Phonetic approximations are, with few exceptions, limited to foreign names. As such, practically every bit of jargon is semantically translated (examples include 电脑 "electronic brain" for computer, 端口 "end opening" for port), but since most programming is done in English-based languages, it's not uncommon for Chinese programmers to be more familiar with the English jargon.

I don't know how you'd better express 'port' than end-opening. After all it refers to the place where boats are loaded and unloaded. Honestly the semantic translation seems a far more apt term. I guess there's something like 港 but that's probably just more confusing.

> Honestly the semantic translation seems a far more apt term.

That's interesting. For me, the port metaphor makes me think data port, which seems like a pretty apt parallel to the flow of goods at a shipping port.

Different metaphors for different folks, I suppose.

Fair enough! It's interesting to think about the literal meaning of the keywords and industry jargon in English too.

Interestingly, many glosses using Chinese characters (not all, but many) were from Japan-- sometimes used phonetically (e.g. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004438200_008), and sometimes used to translate concepts. Chinese imported many such loan words for technology from glosses that were made in Japan with kanji for words which had no existing equivalent in Chinese (https://www.jstor.org/stable/23754127). But then Japan increasingly gave up new words in favor of transliteration, while Chinese continued to have this need. Chinese words that are phonetic approximations of foreign words are perhaps less common, but by no means rare. They're not all from English (e.g., 'grapes' is a transliteration from Indo-Iranian), and sometimes you have to look at the Cantonese pronunciation to hear the resemblance to English, and sometimes they're neatly hidden by a choice of word that fits well phonetically _and_ semantically.

This has been true for Finnish also, more because of a stuffy language office that wanted to avoid unnatural influences.

Computer = tietokone = knowledge machine

Swap file = heittovaihtotiedosto = throw exchange record set (or some such).

So yeah, Finnish programmers rarely used the official words.

Latin languages use IA

Maybe they mean "information architecture." Facebook does produce Docusaurus, after all, one of the best documentation platforms out there today :)

Could just be a small typo too

Intelligence Augmentation?

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