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The Awful German Language (1880)

(faculty.georgetown.edu)
189 points nalinidash | 3 comments | 16 May 25 04:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.423s | source
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rawbert ◴[16 May 25 06:21 UTC] No.44002326[source]▶
As a developer working in a German company the question of translating some domain language items into English comes up here and there. Mostly we fail because the German compound words are so f*** precise that we are unable to find short matching English translations...unfortunately our non-native devs have to learn complex words they can't barely pronounce :D

Most of the time we try to use English for technical identifiers and German for business langugage, leading to lets say "interesting" code, but it works for us.

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1. watwut ◴[16 May 25 06:48 UTC] No.44002459[source]▶
The exact same issue exists with translating English to German - long German words suddenly dont fit. And with translating English into Polish too.
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2. blkhawk ◴[16 May 25 07:32 UTC] No.44002686[source]▶
yes, this can cause even major-ish UI issues - like in android where this happens:

cut,copy,paste auschneiden,kopieren,einfügen

this can break the UI so you have scroll on a popup just to copy a piece of text because google put "copy" last in the selection.

3. rawbert ◴[16 May 25 11:30 UTC] No.44004074[source]▶
I was once involved in building the UI for a video game. There was some kind of labels for baseic color selection ... "czerwony" instead of "red" broke everything :F