3 ms·

I agree that English as lingua franca of computing makes sense, especially when communicating with non-(German)-native speakers. But one important reason why Ge

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-else.md https://github.com/e-n-f/if-then-else/blob/master/if-then-el...)

formerly_proven 3y ago
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.
- flohofwoe 3y ago
  The 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 ago
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.
usrusr 3y ago
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.
- maweki 3y ago
  > 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-priorities https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-lang-prioritie...
  - derefr 3y ago
    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/languages 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.
bee_rider 3y ago
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?
- flohofwoe 3y ago
  Yes that's exactly it.
numpad0 3y ago
> 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.
- flohofwoe 3y ago
  Yep exactly, the translation is about "time-codes", not about "link-time".
- derefr 3y ago
  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?

formerly_proven 3y ago

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.

flohofwoe 3y ago
The 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 ago

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.

usrusr 3y ago

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.

maweki 3y ago
> 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-priorities https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-lang-prioritie...
- derefr 3y ago
  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/languages 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.

bee_rider 3y ago

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?

flohofwoe 3y ago
Yes that's exactly it.

numpad0 3y ago

> 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.

flohofwoe 3y ago
Yep exactly, the translation is about "time-codes", not about "link-time".
derefr 3y ago
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?