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The Awful German Language (1880)

(faculty.georgetown.edu)
186 points nalinidash | 2 comments | 16 May 25 04:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.439s | 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. antirez ◴[16 May 25 15:49 UTC] No.44006867[source]▶
Maybe you could look into establishing a proper-technical-terminology-direct-literal-translation-enforcement-protocol that uses "-" and translates German words more or less literally. The effect should be very obvious for German speakers, and more obvious than German words to English speaking folks.
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2. layer8 ◴[17 May 25 01:03 UTC] No.44011220[source]▶
This leads to cringy non-idiomatic kf nit nonsensical English though. As a non-native but fluent English speaker, working in projects where people with only basic English proficiency translated the native terms into English by naive dictionary lookup, or sometimes by selecting false friends, is really painful, because the translations give all the wrong signals and connotations in English.