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Comment by ofrzeta | Hacker News Reader

As a German I use browsers in English because when I have to google things it's much easier and you don't need to translate back and forth in your head. Also I prefer technical documentation such as on Microsoft's developer pages or AWS in English. It's just so much easier with the lingua franca.

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.

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I agree that English as lingua franca of computing makes sense, especially when communicating with non-(German)-native speakers. But one important reason why German is no longer viable for this is the terrible state of translation from English to German. Instead of using the "established" German terms, English terms are usually translated word-by-word to German without context, either by machine translation, or bad human translators who don't have a technological background (for instance for a long time, "link time code generation" was called "Link Zeitcode Generierung" in MSVC's German documentation, which doesn't have anything to do with LTCG even though it is correct German and a (mostly) correct word-by-word translation of the English term).

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...)

The upside is that English comprehension correlates extremely well with technical ability for non-graybeards. Curiously german hiring managers haven't caught onto this at all, though that might be because they themselves largely lack the required language skills to test candidates for this.

The same effect correlates with overrating the technical skills of job candidates who are native English speakers in German companies though ;)

I held onto my former job for another couple of years longer than I had expected precisely because of the fine, German engineering language.

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.

Even as a kid still going through that phase where English lessons at school consist of very simple descriptions of family life that add some new words each week, I felt betrayed by GW BASIC documention referring to some concept with the cryptic letters "E/A". When I realized that they were talking about "I/O", translated as Eingabe/Ausgabe, suddenly it all made sense.

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.

> There really needs to be some way for language preferences to include quality in some way.

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...

I think what the GP is describing isn't about client-server negotiation, though, but rather something that happens purely client-side for already-delivered resources, within e.g. the system for loading the right subtitle track embedded into a playing video.

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.

If translated back into English, would

> Link Zeitcode Generierung

be best understood as something like “Link time-code generation,” rather than, “Link-time code generation,” or something like that?

Yes that's exactly it.

> Link Zeitcode Generierung

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.

Yep exactly, the translation is about "time-codes", not about "link-time".

I honestly find it bizarre that this isn't one of the problems we instantly solved with LLMs.

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?

Same here. I love the creativity (and am impressed by it) it takes to invent new German words for things, even though I agree that it is impractical for the reason you pointed out.

Sadly, terms like "Klapprechner" for "laptop" or "Verklemmung" for "deadlock" never caught on.

Now that you say it ... some professors stubbornly seem to stick to "Verklemmung" :)

https://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/Studium/Bs/WS2021/V07-Verklemmu...

Enjoy this pdf of nearly 400 pages: https://www4.cs.fau.de/DE/~wosch/glossar.pdf

The second I started reading this thread I was wondering how long it would take for a Wosch document to show up! Thanks for making my day :)

I took his OS class in undergrad and I remember distinctly being annoyed at "Fäden".

„Verklemmung“ is actually a better word for it than “deadlock”.

This reminds me of the time I worked for a local telecommunications company and wrote software to interface with EWSD (Elektronisches Wählsystem Digital) switches. Honestly, working with telecommunications systems was the best time I had in my entire career.

> As a German I use browsers in English

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.

Dubbing is awful (and awful for learning a language) - eg Arnold doesn't ever sound like Arnold; people's voices don't always match their physique but voice is a very large part of someones/ a character personality.

My understanding (I watch in English, after all) is that for them, the dubbing actor is actually an important part of the character.

Every second movie dubbed to German sounds like some cheap porn. Go figure…

This is true, but in French Canada it’s a point of pride to do everything in French. I think if your kids cannot speak English at all you get a merit badge and higher social status. I don’t believe it’s quite the same in Germany

With me not speaking French, I’d assume those are a bit happier with English, considering that I can talk with them ;)

Regarding documentation: my pet peeve is Google’s developer docs which default to showing docs in your account language with no way to change that. It would be fine if the translation was decent, but Google insists on using their awful machine translation and I would much rather just see the docs in English. But there’s no way to set that as the default as far as I could tell.

I don’t know if the default can be changed, but Firefox makes it easy to load a tab in a different account with containers.

You could by default load the documentation domain with an account set to English.

It's kinda sad that we have to use US keyboard layouts as well, to make us of all the keyboard shortcuts targeting it. Best example being the slash chars, which are not dedicated keys, so any shortcuts envolving them don't work.

I feel like in German, you can tell someone a name of tool or other device and they will instantly understand what it is. Translate “Skill Saw” to German and it is completely lost. That being said English has a lot of short form hacks that make communication, faster…

Skil [1] is a brand of circular saws, which I believe they invented.

[1]: https://www.skil.com/

My pet peeve in English terminology is the very word "computer". It should have always been called something like "the mathematical machine", computation is just one of them! The French l'ordinateur is much better.

> computation is just one of them

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.

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