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My cousin in Germany is doing a 1-year long IT schooling course (going from how a PC works, how Win and Linux work, Shell/PS scripting to python and AWS) and the course material has all the technical terms in German: "Rechner", "Speicher", Ordner", "Betriebssystem", instead of Computer, Memory, Folder, Operating system.
Almost nothing from the course material is in English, which was shocking to me as if you're searching online for solutions to issues or learning new concepts, you can't expect in your career to only Google things in German and find answers in German, but you'll have to know to use everything in English to broader your search and knowledge base, so forcing all the candidates and materials in German feels like an unnecessary crippling.
So despite the new clothing, Germany is still a conservative digital dinosaur underneath, pretending to be cool and modern. "How do you do fellow Kinder?"[1]
My 0.02 Eurocents
Using one’s native language as opposed to English is sufficient to make one a “conservative digital dinosaur”?
I think your conclusion is correct, but I don’t think this Anglocentric argument is the reason why.
I studied IT in Sweden and all the course material is in English. MS books, Linux books, Cisco CCNA books etc.
I imagine, as I can't compare, that this makes it easier to learn further in IT, and participate in communities such as this.
That's just my opinion based on personal experience, which can't be right or wrong because like I said, it's an opinion and not a fact.
From what I saw, yes it kinda is. I'm from eastern Europe originally, and here we learn CS and everything IT related directly in English, even though we have our own words for the technical terms, nobody's using them and we just default to the English words. If you go to the Nordics or everything north of Netherlands including them, everyone is schooled in English as well when it comes to IT.
It's mostly Austria, Germany, France and few other conservative countries who insist on using their local language for IT terms out of national pride or something, as using too much English is seen as an defeat/attack on their culture.
> That's just my opinion based on personal experience, which can't be right or wrong
I think yours is actually a (theoretically) falsifiable theory about cause and effect, so it can be right or wrong.
Many IT words that used to be German were replaced by English words if they were shorter ("Direktzugriffsspeicher" => RAM) or easier to pronounce ("Hauptplatine" => Mainboard), and e.g. OS is a common abbreviation in German for "Betriebssystem" because it is shorter - but "operating system" is not, so why switch? There is no upside, so the language didn't evolve that way.
Use Windows or Linux in German, directories are called "Ordner" - why would you teach "folder" instead if the course is in German?
I think it is more awareness of the fortune of cultural diversity.
There's nothing wrong in using local languages. Speaking not-English is not bad. Many go for English because there's a lot of money to chase in the market, not because it's objectively right by some truth of this universe.
We'are a nation with a IT sector, not an IT sector that happens to hve a nation attached to it. Using English is fine, but education and business in Germany must be available to everyone in German and that's why it needs to be taught. We can speak more than one language, so making sure that our culture and language is preserved and speaking English aren't mutually exlusive.
There are many European countries, smaller ones especially, seriously at risk of losing their language and culture.
Sometimes, in university courses I've seen German names for things I had only ever heard the English term of. I suspect almost nobody in the industry actually uses these German terms.
So, not everything is in German. I guess it's probably mostly the stuff that's been around a long time that has acquired a German name, but newer tech is typically referred to by English terminology.
I also agree with my sibling commentor that dismissing a culture because they don't exclusively use English terminology is silly. The German language certainly didn't stop Niklaus Wirth (who was from Switzerland and spoke German) from winning the Turing Award.
Similarly, all my direct coworkers speak Polish, and that's the language we use to talk about technical matters. We do use English words randomly, and our code (comments and variables) and docs are in English, but nobody is complaining about people using their native language.
In your Polish courses do you use translated Polish words for all the IT technical terms, or the original English ones?
Things like "Zbiór danych" (or just "zbiór") instead of "plik" - which translate to "data set" Vs "file"
I had a pretty good understanding of CS before I started college, so I assumed that a degree in English would be better because of how prevalent English is in this field. I... was wrong.
Most professors were not great at speaking the language. Funnily enough, the average student, whether Polish or otherwise, was far better at it than the average professor. Most of the course materials we had were direct translations of their Polish equivalents, usually done by the professors themselves, despite the fact that far higher-quality materials in English were available on the internet. Some of the translations were subtly wrong, one professor consistently used compresion[sic] when he actually meant conversion and twice when he meant times. I've even seen words, error messages and documentation snippets that were translated to Polish in the original materials, and then (badly) translated back to English.
It took me a hilarious amount of time to realize he was talking about mem pages. Many things about that lecture fell into place once that clicked.
Later on, especially the newer courses, had no qualms about just keeping english terms around, or at least made sure to include the english terms though. All of the interesting research happened internationally anyway.
Those are established popular terms with nearly half a century of usage. Newer or less popular terms are often just English.
> Almost nothing from the course material is in English, which was shocking to me
Maybe you don't see it? What about shell, cloud, webservice, etc. Is there something about router, switch, smartphone, microservice, AI? Ai is a pretty funny case, as there is a German term for it (KI), but in the new hype now, it's barely used at all, even in academics.
> So despite the new clothing, Germany is still a conservative digital dinosaur underneath
It's not conservative to have your own culture and history.
Relax, nobody's saying to take your beer and Lederhosen away, but why force your own translations to established industry technical words onto students?
It just creates confusion and hampers further self learning and cooperation as the lingua franca of IT is Englisch anyway.
But that's beside the point.
The original point we if the vast majority of the technical IT jargon is English anyway why do you also need to change them to German for a course or industry? Why not keep those words in English?
Are you going to force UK speakers to say truck, fall and cookie, too?
I'm not talking about languages, I'm talking about the specific words of IT jargon which all originate from English.
>Are you going to force UK speakers to say truck, fall and cookie, too?
No, because those words are not universally used technical IT words bound together by a common language.
With your logic then every country should translate the mnemonics of the programing languages from English to their local languages too, no?
So the "while()" loop will be "während()" in German version of C and "pendant()" in French version of C.
"I'm not talking about languages, I'm talking about words" ...? What do you think words are a part of
> With your logic then every country should translate the mnemonics of the programing languages from English to their local languages too, no?
Programming languages are not natural languages. The comparison doesn't make sense.
No, but it's pretty typical to see Brits talk about datacenters, computer programs and sometimes even catalogs, as opposed to datacentres, computer programmes and catalogues.
They have well written news segments where it comes up relatively frequently at the moment. I don't have cause to talk much about AI to my kids yet so time will tell which terminology they adopt.
It's funny to me how German speakers thing it's cool and modern to use English words throughout their German. But when I as a native English speaker read Denglish, it looks about as cool as socks w/ sandals.
It's true that in the past there were much more German words in "IT" starting with EDV (Elektronische Datenverarbeitung, essentially that is IT). Favorites are "Datensichtgerät" (Monitor) with companies like Siemens (Nixdorf) or NCR that actually built Datenverarbeitungsgeräte.
Sadly, terms like "Klapprechner" for "laptop" or "Verklemmung" for "deadlock" never caught on.
https://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/Studium/Bs/WS2021/V07-Verklemmu...
I took his OS class in undergrad and I remember distinctly being annoyed at "Fäden".
And instead of this butchering of the fine German engineering language, just switching to English is indeed the better alternative (and less painful).
My favourite trivia btw is that the 'else' in 'if-else' is a "bad" translation from German into English ;) (https://github.com/e-n-f/if-then-else/blob/master/if-then-el...)
It turned out that a supplier of a critical subcomponent in some of the systems we were designing and building, had terrific German-language documentation.
The English docs? Not quite as great, packed with ambiguities which simply weren't there in the originals.
Seeing as I was the only one on the team who could read German almost fluently, I simply pulled the 'Who's going to read the docs if I am let go?' card during every downsizing process for years. It worked until someone realized we hadn't supplied any systems with that particular component in it for years and I, alas, had typed up excellent documentation for our service department, covering their needs.
There really needs to be some way for language preferences to include quality in some way. No, I probably don't want an English dub of something Asian when there's also a German dub. But I certainly also don't want some machine or lowest bidder translation that only exists to serve people with no foreign language skill at all (or that's not even remotely as good as the company that commissioned the translation thinks.
In theory, there is. It's called content negotiation. With your browser request you already send a list of preferred languages, like "Accept-Language: da, en-gb;q=0.8, en;q=0.7". RFC9110 states that such a quality/weight is assigned to different representations of a resource.
So all the server needs to do is multiply their quality with your preference and return the one with the highest value.
So the technology for that is already in place. It just isn't done.
See: https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-lang-prioritie...
AFAIK, there's no standard for allowing client-side media-playback frameworks to probe language preferences with quality values out of the browser they're running in. The navigator.languages property (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/l...) doesn't expose qvalues for some reason.
And even if there was, there's no way, in any media container format I know of, of annotating subtitle tracks with quality values — so there's no way of saying that a given track really sucks and should be deprioritized relative to the user's preference ordering, but still used if there's no other choice.
> Link Zeitcode Generierung
be best understood as something like “Link time-code generation,” rather than, “Link-time code generation,” or something like that?
Just for clarification, this says "Link Timecode Generation" where it's supposed to be "Link-time Code-generation"?
I always assumed English-German MT must be somehow serviceable, I wonder if that had been true but limited to its syntax and did not apply to vocabulary, or if German MT is just as useless but German computer users are just patient.
Can't we "just" train a model with a big corpus of English, a big corpus of German, and a big corpus of human-translated Rosetta-Stone-like "annotated with translation" texts — and out will pop a "bilingual" language model that can do translation as fluently as a human could?
Do we just not have the right training data available to make this happen?
I think we are a pretty small minority. Even Germans that are very fluent in English tend to use everything in German. And for that matter, though my sample size is far smaller there, so seem other countries. The few French Canadians I know all have their software in French.
I’m the only one of my friends I know who has everything set to English, some of them even watch German dubbed shows and movies. And that’s despite most of them being fluent in English.
You could by default load the documentation domain with an account set to English.
I always thought that, apart from moving bits around, computation (in the sense of performing calculations, like the people that used to be called "computers" before) is the only thing a computer actually does. It just so happens that the computations have many practical applications and results.
I don't quite understand the versatility of "ordinateur" that you mention. Maybe it's because I only know a little bit of French (and a tiny speck of Latin), but it sounds like it refers to something that puts things in order, like sorting. And that seems to be only a subset of what computation can do.
In short, I'm wondering how my interpretation of these words differs from yours.
So that's something to keep in mind with qualifications like that. It's noteworthy that university-level formal computer science courses still make heavy use of "German" words for lots of concepts which causes a lot of headaches when coming from or moving to international (i.e. English) sources, especially for things like algorithms and data structures or programming language concepts (e.g. pointers, stack, loops).
Plus come up with factories that could mass-produce the products at commodity prices.
I always thought it was cool to see what happened when people like that got a hold of programmable electronics, especially solid-state.
A bit like computer software, no one just messes around to make pong or hello world anymore, they are spending 6 months white boarding the thing before they write any code. (Or maybe they aren’t, but in hardware we do)
So … nothing super amazing in my sleep anymore. Waking up in the middle of the night to design a circuit to provide a constant -5vdc for a 555 timer while the rest of the circuit is +\- something or another, just doesn’t happen anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_mouse#Rollkugel
https://www.e-basteln.de/computing/rollkugel/rollkugel/
Engelbarts mouse didn't have a ball.