I speak fluent German - like a native. Only after 20 years in London I cannot participate in a hard- or software-related technical discussion in German, because I wasn't exposed to that milieu in a German-speaking environment.
And so I excpected something that maybe explains how you might say "inversion of control" or "edge/perimiter network" or "public key cryptography" or "tiers vs. layers" in German. My quest continues.
You say it exactly as you wrote, thankfully we have stopped translating that kind of term. Translations are only found at the extreme edges of the formality spectrum: in very formal writing, you use whatever is defined in the glossary of your organisation, and informal chitchat might occasionally be spiced up with ridiculous translations spontaneously made up on the spot.
Even when I was a child, with no or very little education in English under my belt, the chapter "E/A-Anweisungen" in my trusty GW-BASIC manual confused me to no end. I'm pretty sure that I would have grasped the meaning of "IO".
Where those terms still rule unchallenged is in MS Excel formulas. All the function names are translated. When you are a native speaker but used to programming vocabulary, Excel expressions read like hieroglyphics: you can easily identify most of the symbols, but the semantics remain unknown.
...except that you still need to memorize or deduce the correct articles. Der Layer (ends in -er); die VM (die (virtuelle) Maschine); die Postgres-Database (die (Daten-)Bank); das Upgrade (probably because it's a verb turned into a noun, like das Aktualisieren?), etc. Fun!
For some reason, many recent open source tools are still translated into German word by word. I guess the volunteer translators feel like they're cheating when they use English terms?
"Das Layer", for me, 100%. But I can't give a reason.
Translations are difficult. If you are talking or writing you just use the first word that comes to mind, but when you are translating it takes active effort to decide on where to stop. On top of that, with open source translations there is always a bit of an assumption (and self-fulfilling prophecy) that power users would stick to the original English and when you think of an audience that does not know the technical terms it feels like helping them if you forcibly translate (which might be a mistake).
Thanks for that and yes you're right. I think this isn't so critical though. My (French) girlfriend speaks German, with terrible grammar - but people understand her. I wish my French was as good...
I couldn't care less about the correct article (although I mostly guess correctly anyway). I think being understood is the real winner. As is seeking to understand, of course.
Man, as a native German I hate this obsession with german naming english words. Disruptive becomes "erschütternd" which is a bad translation, or how do you translate "tech-stack"? Technologie Haufen? I solve this by speaking denglish, but sometimes my fellow Germans who are less into the tech lingo complain about that. I really hate it when germans try to germanize international english words.
Technologiehaufen sounds refreshingly honest if what you are referring to is the usual tangled mess of tools hotwired together from the repositories, and not the carefully vetted selection of neatly interlocking components people dream of when they say "tech stack". The latter might be called Basistechnologiekompisition which did not even exist in the Google index until now. If you insisted on making a direct translation, you should at least go with Stapel, not Haufen.
Tangent: stack (as in LIFO) is traditionally translated Keller instead of the much more literal Stapel, likely to avoid ambiguity between batch (also Stapel) and stack. One of the few ancient computer English translations that absolutely did make it into the 21st century is "Stapelverarbeitung". I think that this is because it sounds just as clumsy as the concept it is describing. When you say Stapelverarbeitung you can almost feel that stack of punched cards that you have never worked with if you are my generation.
It seems like there was an effort in the 80ies/90ies to have native German names for concepts in computer science, but today those just sound very dated.
I find this interesting because my native tongue, Finnish, is quite good about accepting neologisms.
People do use English terms, but it's also very common that there exists a native word and people will use that. Calling computers "kompuutteri" would sound hilariously old-timey compared to "tietokone" (or "tietsikka"). The same goes for "telefooni" vs. "puhelin", though curiously enough I'm perfectly fine using both "pointteri" and "osoitin" when speaking about programming.
I guess part of it is because Finnish is not Germanic so direct loans sound bad... Often they get nativized so that eg a laptop in colloquial speech becomes "läppäri"
“Computer” is non-existent in Hungarian, we call it számitógép, built from the words számitás (to calculate) and gép (machine). Since most Hungarian words are constructed like that, it sounds completely native to the language.
I cringe whenever I hear English words mixed in with Hungarian ones, they sound completely out of place, which is probably not true for German.
I think we can roughly equate Swedish with German, and gosh do English words sound "cringe" in Swedish. Luckily, we can often use the direct translation, English being very Germanic. Pointer becomes "pekare" for instance. Mouse "mus" and so on. So people recognize what it came from and can use the familiar sounding native version. "Computer" becomes "dator" meaning something operating on "data". "Data" is "data" in both. "Linked list" is "länkad lista". You see the pattern?
This happens in Portugal vs Brazil. Portuguese have native terms ("mouse" is "rato") and Brazilians just import everything "mouse", "celular", "desktop".
That's not correct. The invented word probably comes from the 'Taalunie'. It might be that the Flemish adhere more to it than the Dutch (I have no statistics)
They make a new word using Dutch spelling whereas the Dutch use the English words one-for-one. Basically all of the words around computing are English words (which actually made it harder to learn Dutch, you need to know when the English words are actually the correct ones).
I'm Flemish, and I worked in The Netherlands for more than 4 years. The dutch understand "muis" (mouse) "toetsenbord" (keyboard). There are dutch words with different meaning in both regions (like "aftrappen", "precies"). I think the biggest problem learning Dutch for foreigners (except for the rather complicated grammar) is that there are plenty of dialects (especially in Flanders).
I remember a uni class about data structures that we had to study with a german book... With things like "Keller" for the recursion base and "Halde" for the heap. Oh boy.
I don't see the problem with translating terms that have a strong visual component, especially if it's an introductory text. It also depends on how old the text is (fundamental concepts don't change much) and if the current nomenclature has already been established back then.
I've never heard German words for any concepts like that outside of university.
You'll usually get by just pronouncing those words a bit more German or replacing the ones that are very close to German words with the German one (e.g. cryptography -> Kryptographie but "public key cryptography" -> Public Key Kryptographie). If you want to "pass" while speaking German but need to use English jargon, just use a slight German accent and nobody will bat an eye.
Fun fact: most Latin-based English words work in German as long as you pronounce them like a German would, at worst you'll just sound a bit stilted or old-fashioned.
> most Latin-based English words work in German as long as you pronounce them like a German would
Only those that were introduced from Latin texts (alongside all the ancient Greek we tend to confuse with Latin). Those that came from Latin via French are for when you need to cheat in the same way west of the Rhine.
I'm a software engineering student in Austria and have interned at multiple companies and we always just used the respective English terms.
Actually, I've noticed that I sometimes just use English words mixed with German in my day-to-day talking too because they come to mind more quickly. Probably ~10% of what I say when talking German is English (with German grammar of course).
I am German living in Germany, but for the last 5 years all my work/professional live is english and I also have small word finding problems when talking about the same concepts in german, just because I usually never do it.
If I'm talking to colleagues or making notes I just use the English words. I mean all my notes about computer related topics are in English. When I write a documentation or an e-mail for or to customers I translate everything to German. I feel this helps me to keep things simpler and makes it easier to understand.
I have to say I hate mixing languages. It makes me feel uneducated and a bit like a loss of identity. Especially German is really expressive and it shouldn't be a problem to make up the words needed to express yourself.
I speak fluent German - like a native. Only after 20 years in London I cannot participate in a hard- or software-related technical discussion in German, because I wasn't exposed to that milieu in a German-speaking environment.
And so I excpected something that maybe explains how you might say "inversion of control" or "edge/perimiter network" or "public key cryptography" or "tiers vs. layers" in German. My quest continues.