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The Awful German Language (1880)

(faculty.georgetown.edu)
185 points nalinidash | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.255s | source
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rawbert ◴[] 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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Fokamul ◴[] No.44003209[source]
In my experience, problems is not with German as a language, but with Germans requiring to use their hard language, I live in neighboring country and since like 2010, nobody bothers to learn German anymore, (some small percent still learn, ok) and everyone who I know rather works in different country because of this. Like Netherlands, still hard language (multiple) but they don't expect you to learn it when working for multi-national company.
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1. mixermachine ◴[] No.44004772[source]
Can't confirm this. I'm a native German working for a company in Munich and as soon anybody joins to the meeting that is not German we switch to English. 90% of meetings are in English.

When my Russian colleague asks me to speak German because he wants to practice then I speak some German with him. Otherwise all our conversations are in English.

The experience might be different in "older" companies.