The Awful German Language (1880)

(faculty.georgetown.edu)

189 points nalinidash | 1 comments | 16 May 25 04:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.226s | 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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marcosscriven ◴[16 May 25 08:22 UTC] No.44002985[source]▶

>>44002326 #

I think the issue of German compound nouns is seriously overegged. In almost all cases, it’s essentially the same as English, except with some spaces. It’s not like suddenly a short compound word expresses something that couldn’t be in English.

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1. carstenhag ◴[16 May 25 22:54 UTC] No.44010526[source]▶

>>44002985 #

In some way yes, but not really. Had a colleague working on a project for Deutsche Bahn (state owned train operator), he was developing an app and the domain knowledge was full of long German words, no one outside this bubble ever uses: Bremshundertstel, Bremszettel, Mindestbremshundertstel, Notbremsüberbrückung... In a way it's better to have a super long name for this, so there are no 2-3 ways to describe the same thing.

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