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The Awful German Language (1880)

(faculty.georgetown.edu)
186 points nalinidash | 4 comments | 16 May 25 04:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.624s | 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. arnsholt ◴[16 May 25 06:59 UTC] No.44002514[source]▶
I worked on a case management system for a few years that dealt with Norwegian criminal law, and we did the same. Technical terms and conventional parts of method identifiers (like getFoo, setFoo, isFoo and such) were in English while the domain terminology was left in Norwegian. It looks a bit weird when you first encounter it, but honestly it was fine. Especially for a domain with as much emphasis on nuance and as many country specific details as the legal domain anything else would be a terrible idea IMO. Not only would it be really hard to translate many cases, it would probably make the code harder to understand and in some cases even cause misunderstandings.
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2. dep_b ◴[16 May 25 10:51 UTC] No.44003818[source]▶
Yeah nothing worse than entering a translated to English portal for Dutch tax purposes. Because those English words also ended up in Business Dutch but then got another meaning. Dutchlish, or at least the original term in parenthesis) is really preferable to anything else.
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3. ChristianJacobs ◴[16 May 25 11:32 UTC] No.44004096[source]▶
Same as a friend of mine who works for NAV. There's a whole lot of long-ass variable and function names because they use the Norwegian name for whatever they are calculating. It makes sense for them though, as the ones who review your code are lawyers...
4. lucb1e ◴[16 May 25 19:58 UTC] No.44009251[source]▶
Words like beamer for projector... but isn't that similar between all countries? Even within English-speaking countries? You don't know what some Australian-specific or AAVE word means until someone tells you, no matter where you're from. Every version of English is a dialect of English so long as it's still a complete language (having semantics and all that)