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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
by 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 agoSame 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 agoNow 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 agoEnjoy 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 agoThe 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„Verklemmung“ is actually a better word for it than “deadlock”.
- jabiko 3y agoThis 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.
- flohofwoe 3y agoI 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-else.md https://github.com/e-n-f/if-then-else/blob/master/if-then-el...)
- formerly_proven 3y agoThe 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.
- flohofwoe 3y agoThe same effect correlates with overrating the technical skills of job candidates who are native English speakers in German companies though ;)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lb1lf 3y agoI 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.
- Semaphor 3y ago> 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.
- Ylpertnodi 3y agoDubbing 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.
- Semaphor 3y agoMy understanding (I watch in English, after all) is that for them, the dubbing actor is actually an important part of the character.
- rad_gruchalski 3y agoEvery second movie dubbed to German sounds like some cheap porn. Go figure…
- 486sx33 3y agoThis 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
- Semaphor 3y agoWith me not speaking French, I’d assume those are a bit happier with English, considering that I can talk with them ;)
- jaflo 3y agoRegarding 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.
- tass 3y agoI 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.
- H8crilA 3y agoMy 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.
- dxdm 3y ago> 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.
- addandsubtract 3y agoIt'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.
- 486sx33 3y agoI 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…
- unwind 3y agoSkil [1] is a brand of circular saws, which I believe they invented. [1]: https://www.skil.com/ https://www.skil.com/