6 ms·

It's so cool to see machines from an age when Germans still referred to technical things using their native language.

_trampeltier 3y ago
Siemens S7-300/400 PLCs manuals used german words (Akku, Doppelwort ..). Also AWL (something like Assembler for PLCs) used german mnemonic by default. It just changed with the new S7-1200/1500 TIA generation. Now they use english words everywhere and AWL mnemonic is english by default.
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
It's still mostly the same in Germany today. 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 [1] https://youtu.be/fiOMbqPHFwo?si=CIbdpdTXnkQ6MyJs&t=28 https://youtu.be/fiOMbqPHFwo?si=CIbdpdTXnkQ6MyJs&t=28
- denotational 3y ago
  > Germany is still a conservative digital dinosaur underneath 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.
  - Unfrozen0688 3y ago
    In a way it makes it harder to then learn further on later, something required in IT. 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.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >Using one’s native language as opposed to English is sufficient to make one a “conservative digital dinosaur”? 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.
    - Tainnor 3y ago
      The US is the only country that insists on using systems of units that nobody else is using and that hasn't stopped it from becoming an economical juggernaut. > 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.
    - schroeding 3y ago
      I can't agree. It's not about national pride, IMO, but about the organic development of the language. Some of these terms date back to the pre-war period, think of the Zuse-1 era. 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?
- Tainnor 3y ago
  "Rechner" and "Computer" are interchangeable and probably used equally frequently, as are "Hauptspeicher" and "RAM", etc. Some words do seem to be mainly referred to by their German names ("Betriebssystem", "Datenbank"), while for many others, I'm not aware of any German equivalent in common usage ("event sourcing", "operations", "pull/merge request", "branch", ...). 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.
- Kwpolska 3y ago
  I have a degree in CS, from a Polish university, and virtually all the course material was in Polish. That's a legal requirement, since I signed up for a degree taught in Polish, and I can't be expected to speak English, even though I would be useless in real life if I didn't. An English version would be available, but it would probably be painful, considering how bad some of the teachers are at short phrases, let alone a semester's worth of lectures. 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.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    You're confusing two deferent things. I was talking about the language of technical IT terms, not which language you use at the course/school/university as of course that will almost always be the local language out of legal requirements. In your Polish courses do you use translated Polish words for all the IT technical terms, or the original English ones?
    - p_l 3y ago
      It's a mix. General terms will be usually in Polish, in some older textbooks or other materials you can encounter really different terms that relate to different era. Things like "Zbiór danych" (or just "zbiór") instead of "plik" - which translate to "data set" Vs "file"
    - eternauta3k 3y ago
      What are examples of technical IT terms you use in English instead of translating them?
  - miki123211 3y ago
    I also have a degree in CS from a Polish university, but my degree was actually taught in English. 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.
- tetha 3y ago
  I have one memory from university just burned into my head and will most likely never forget it. During a course on operating systems, I got increasingly confused by the prof talking about "Speicherkacheln", which translates to "memory tiles" - i.e. small tiles you'd glue to a wall in a bathroom. 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.
- PurpleRamen 3y ago
  > 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. 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.
  - Rinzler89 3y ago
    >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.
    - flohofwoe 3y ago
      TBH, if a student lacks the brain capacity to translate German technical terms to English in a course that's held in German language then I would question the fitness of said student for a technical job in general.
      - Rinzler89 3y ago
        It's not a job, it's a course. Not everyone attending such a course is fluent bilingual. 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?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- LAC-Tech 3y ago
  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] 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.
ofrzeta 3y ago
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.
- mr_mitm 3y ago
  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.
  - ofrzeta 3y ago
    Now that you say it ... some professors stubbornly seem to stick to "Verklemmung" :) https://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/Studium/Bs/WS2021/V07-Verklemmungen.pdf https://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/Studium/Bs/WS2021/V07-Verklemmu...
    - qznc 3y ago
      Enjoy this pdf of nearly 400 pages: https://www4.cs.fau.de/DE/~wosch/glossar.pdf https://www4.cs.fau.de/DE/~wosch/glossar.pdf
      - honululu 3y ago
        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".
    - gumby 3y ago
hnbad 3y ago
German actually used to make heavy use of French loan words for everyday objects. There was a very intentional shift in replacing loan words with Germanic words around the 1930s (really starting in the 1920s I think), I think you can imagine why that gained traction. 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).

Siemens S7-300/400 PLCs manuals used german words (Akku, Doppelwort ..). Also AWL (something like Assembler for PLCs) used german mnemonic by default. It just changed with the new S7-1200/1500 TIA generation. Now they use english words everywhere and AWL mnemonic is english by default.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

It's still mostly the same in Germany today. 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 [1] https://youtu.be/fiOMbqPHFwo?si=CIbdpdTXnkQ6MyJs&t=28 https://youtu.be/fiOMbqPHFwo?si=CIbdpdTXnkQ6MyJs&t=28

denotational 3y ago
> Germany is still a conservative digital dinosaur underneath 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.
- Unfrozen0688 3y ago
  In a way it makes it harder to then learn further on later, something required in IT. 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.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >Using one’s native language as opposed to English is sufficient to make one a “conservative digital dinosaur”? 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.
  - Tainnor 3y ago
    The US is the only country that insists on using systems of units that nobody else is using and that hasn't stopped it from becoming an economical juggernaut. > 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.
  - schroeding 3y ago
    I can't agree. It's not about national pride, IMO, but about the organic development of the language. Some of these terms date back to the pre-war period, think of the Zuse-1 era. 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?
Tainnor 3y ago
"Rechner" and "Computer" are interchangeable and probably used equally frequently, as are "Hauptspeicher" and "RAM", etc. Some words do seem to be mainly referred to by their German names ("Betriebssystem", "Datenbank"), while for many others, I'm not aware of any German equivalent in common usage ("event sourcing", "operations", "pull/merge request", "branch", ...). 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.
Kwpolska 3y ago
I have a degree in CS, from a Polish university, and virtually all the course material was in Polish. That's a legal requirement, since I signed up for a degree taught in Polish, and I can't be expected to speak English, even though I would be useless in real life if I didn't. An English version would be available, but it would probably be painful, considering how bad some of the teachers are at short phrases, let alone a semester's worth of lectures. 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.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  You're confusing two deferent things. I was talking about the language of technical IT terms, not which language you use at the course/school/university as of course that will almost always be the local language out of legal requirements. In your Polish courses do you use translated Polish words for all the IT technical terms, or the original English ones?
  - p_l 3y ago
    It's a mix. General terms will be usually in Polish, in some older textbooks or other materials you can encounter really different terms that relate to different era. Things like "Zbiór danych" (or just "zbiór") instead of "plik" - which translate to "data set" Vs "file"
  - eternauta3k 3y ago
    What are examples of technical IT terms you use in English instead of translating them?
- miki123211 3y ago
  I also have a degree in CS from a Polish university, but my degree was actually taught in English. 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.
tetha 3y ago
I have one memory from university just burned into my head and will most likely never forget it. During a course on operating systems, I got increasingly confused by the prof talking about "Speicherkacheln", which translates to "memory tiles" - i.e. small tiles you'd glue to a wall in a bathroom. 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.
PurpleRamen 3y ago
> 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. 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.
- Rinzler89 3y ago
  >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.
  - flohofwoe 3y ago
    TBH, if a student lacks the brain capacity to translate German technical terms to English in a course that's held in German language then I would question the fitness of said student for a technical job in general.
    - Rinzler89 3y ago
      It's not a job, it's a course. Not everyone attending such a course is fluent bilingual. 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?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
LAC-Tech 3y ago
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] 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.

ofrzeta 3y ago

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.

mr_mitm 3y ago
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.
- ofrzeta 3y ago
  Now that you say it ... some professors stubbornly seem to stick to "Verklemmung" :) https://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/Studium/Bs/WS2021/V07-Verklemmungen.pdf https://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/Studium/Bs/WS2021/V07-Verklemmu...
  - qznc 3y ago
    Enjoy this pdf of nearly 400 pages: https://www4.cs.fau.de/DE/~wosch/glossar.pdf https://www4.cs.fau.de/DE/~wosch/glossar.pdf
    - honululu 3y ago
      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".
  - gumby 3y ago

hnbad 3y ago

German actually used to make heavy use of French loan words for everyday objects. There was a very intentional shift in replacing loan words with Germanic words around the 1930s (really starting in the 1920s I think), I think you can imagine why that gained traction. 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).