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Comment by JodieBenitez | Hacker News Reader

"Nous distribuons notre infrastructure sur plusieurs hébergeurs dans chaque État membre de l'Union européenne. Notre pile logicielle sur mesure a été testée au combat pendant plus de 3 ans, répondant à des billions de requêtes et servant des centaines de milliers d'utilisateurs chez NextDNS."

Claims it's 100% european, can't even have proper french. :-/

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Clearly a translation from English. Which is funny since there are no native English-speaking languages in the EU anymore (Ireland's first official language is not English).

But also, it's amazing that the EU can function at all with the amount of criticism it gets if every single little communication is not perfectly tuned for every potential European reader. :-/

> Which is funny since there are no native English-speaking languages in the EU anymore (Ireland's first official language is not English).

Did you mean "no native English speakers"? There are - Ireland.

"First" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I'm sure you well know there are 2 official languages in Ireland, and English is used by the majority of the population, and English-only speakers far outnumber the fluent bilingual speakers.

Of course on paper Ireland are going to hold Irish as supreme (which I support), but de facto and practically, the language of Ireland is English.

Ireland and Malta still remain EU members whose official languages include English.

More over, the lingua franca of Europe is still English, despite any French sadness that it's not French any more.

I suspect that will be news to most (97%) of Irelands population :-) Ireland is very much an English speaking country with Irish coming a distant second despite both being 'official' languages and the latter being our traditional tongue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_European_Unio...

https://www.cso.ie/en/csolatestnews/pressreleases/2023pressr...

I'm 100% european and can't speak french. Seems perfectly plausible.

(It's very French of you to complain about it, though.)

Always happy to help.

I'm not sure where you see the bad french.

It's not traditional idiomatic, but we're also in 2025 and most people won't even understand the old idioms.

To a french ear, it sounds like a (bad) translation from English.

For instance, "a été testée au combat" is meaningless in French. The same idea in idiomatic French would be "a subi l'épreuve du feu". And I guess the "billions" should be only "milliards" (French uses the long scale, so the word "billion" exists but corresponds to a thousand billions as understood in (US?) English)...

I hear you, but it's also a reality that more people in our field have heard "battle tested", know what it means and understand the French translation than "épreuve du feu" (I genuinely only ever read that idiom, and not once since the horrible movie which got that as the French name).

That's where I'm saying going back to an older idiom just makes it classic, and doesn't help communication in itself IMHO.

"testée au combat" is a dumb and lazy translation for "battle-tested". Also, we don't have billions here, it's "milliards". The fact that it comes from a french non-profit organization makes it even worse. Such a lack of respect for their own culture makes me sad.

French culture is more than sticking to old idioms. A language dies when it stops evolving with times.

It's a bad, very literal machine translation. ChatGPT would do a better job.

A billion in French is 10^12 (1,000,000,000,000) so I doubt they truly served "billions de requêtes".

2x10^12 isn't crazy for a number of requests over 3 years.

For comparison Cloudflare deals with 32 million requests per second[0]. I don't know if they're at CF scale, but in itself it's still a plausible number for a multinational DNS.

[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/application-security/

PS: mistaking the short scale for the longer is common, but that shouldn't be a pretext to straight throw every use of "billion" under the bus.

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