Can you discuss CS in your native language?

Coming from Latin America I would have never imagined before this thread that so many large countries would not teach CS in their own languages, and would have to speak in English amongst themselves!

It's fascinating, over here we incorporate thousands of English words into the Spanish IT lingo, but while they can could roughly communicate in English, most people I know wouldn't be able to have a discussion entirely in English. As others have said, there's several literal translations for some concepts, but it feels a bit condescending/academic to use those instead of the English words in casual environments.

A fun quirk of this is that we turn many English verbs into Spanish versions of them (where verbs must end in -ar -er -or). Some examples: - to commit -> committear - to pull -> pullear - to deploy -> deployar

That last one is particularly fun because it turns the 'y' at the end into a consonant (sort of like if you said 'deployate'). And we do all this instinctively, for some reason it's what feels most natural!

A sad quirk is that we've also adopted the frustrating English tendency to turn _everything_ into acronyms, which always irks me.

Amazing thread!

For my PhD thesis, I was required to write an abstract in my native language, German, and had a pretty hard time of it. On the other hand, I've experimented a bit with high school level CS teaching, and found that with sufficient preparation, it's fairly doable.

I suspect that when we struggle to express a concept in our native language, we may have somewhat deceived ourselves in how clearly we expressed the concept in English. I notice all the time that people think they are more profound in a foreign language, when it's in fact precisely their lack of familiarity with that language that disguises the banality (A phenomenon also known as "quidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur").

Somewhat related, I see people cursing in foreign languages…

The comments here remind me how music notation has adopted Italian as the default language with all other musicians must follow.

> There are some Italian terms like 'tempo', 'adagio', 'allegretto' and 'rallentando' which are only used in the context of writing or reading music. But others, like 'concerto', 'piano', 'soprano' and 'opera' were so stylish that they have made their way from the original Italian into our everyday musical vocabulary.

https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/music-theory/why-it...

I think I can only echo most of the comments here that of course there are translations of "branch" "implementation" etc., but the norm is to adapt the English one to the language in my experience.

Good example is Turkish, there have been a lot of effort into deriving enough words to be able to converse in full Turkish about the CS topics or even Scientific topics, but it was not able to "satisfy the demand".

As an example, "feeding data to some service", there is a widely used "veri" for "data", and there is also translation of "to feed", "beslemek".

Sometimes when I hear "Servise veri besliyoruz"(We are feeding data to the service) I immediately think of someone feeding some kind of animal.

So in my experience talking to Turkish developers, if they are from a "corporate" environment, they are more likely to use these native words but people involved in startups etc. usually say "Servise Data feedliyoruz". (Generalising a lot here, I am sure they are a lot of exceptions)

Fun fact: Turkish actually derived a word for "to compute" to avoid confusing it with "to calculate", Although it is not used at all: "bermek". while the "calculating" is "hesaplamak".

In case you are interested(Turkish): http://user.ceng.metu.edu.tr/~ucoluk/yazin/berimsel_bir_dene...

I can speak several African languages and a few ethnic dialects(fairly common thing)indigenous to West Africa, but I consider myself, a native English speaker because I was educated entirely in English(It's the official language of my motherland).

With that being said, due to the high nature of abstraction when treating CS concepts, you'd be hard-pressed to find vocabulary built into an African language or dialect that could support any meaningful conversation on a CS topic. A few governments looked into it, but it's almost impossible to implement anything in local languages. Transliterating or translating directly from English doesn't generally work. Same for the francophone countries, and the majority of sub-Saharan Africa(including the Portuguese-speaking islands I've been to). You can have conversations in those dialects but you'll need to mix them up with English, and therefore, CS is mainly taught in English.

However, in North Africa and the League of Arab states, I've witnessed CS courses that were taught in Arabic, but the instructor had to default to English words to explain programming concept. It's usually a hilarious mix-match of English and Arabic that could be defined as a language on its own.

I'm Flemish, so I speak Dutch. Since it's a small language, at university, most advanced courses used English (or French) books. There are a lot of concepts I cannot even start to explain in Dutch. I just don't have the vocabulary.

I also was really shocked to learn later that there are programmers who don't speak English: I once interviewed a French developer who didn't know any English. He explained me that all his courses were in French, so there's no need/opportunity.

Yes, I talk (almost) exclusively German to my co workers / friends etc.

However a lot of CS specific English terms are used and adapted to fit German grammar.

Example:

Committest du in den Master oder hast du einen neuen Branch angelegt? (Are you comitting into the master branch or did you create a new one)

There was an idea in the 90s in Poland to have each and every computer/CS term have its native equivalent, but the ones proposed were awkward to say the least.

To give an example: a mouse click was supposed to be called a "mlask", which directly translates to "a smack of the lips".

Needless to say that didn't stick and nowadays only veteran programmers are even aware that such an attempt was made.

I'm Russian and Georgian native speaker.

Short answer to your question is "NO", but I would not bother writing it, if not the long answer I really want to share.

While languages I speak are not similar at all, I see the same behavior among my colleagues, whatever their native language is. They use IT specific English words mixed into their native language.

What is even more interesting, is that these English words do not replace native words, but become domain specific language.

So, for instance, for Georgian.

Task is "ამოცანა" (amotsana)

Done is "დამთავრებული" (damt'avrebuli)

So one and the same person will tell you ამოცანა დავამთავრე (amostana davamt'avre) when speaking about some task in general, but when it's about task in Jira, it becomes "ტასკი დავდანე" ([task]i dav[done]e)

For Russian it's almost the same.

Fixing is "исправлять" (ispravliat) or "чинить" (chinit)

Bug is "ошибка" (oshibka)

But nobody is "исправляет ошибки" (ispravliaet oshibki) when it's about IT. Living person would say "фиксить баги" ([fix]it [bug]i). But nobody would say "фиксить" (fixit) about a car.

You may notice that English words grow suffixes and prefixed to adopt to grammar of another language. It's not the language you may find in books, but it is how people around me communicate.

Persian native here. Every now and then I tell myself it's time to start translating some of the books that interest me and that haven't been translated already, but then I find myself reading some related books (translated to Persian/Farsi) and after seeing some of the ridiculous terms used for the translations, I just give-up and postpone the entire idea for some uncertain future.

I personally have to guess some of the meanings and for some other words/terms I need a Persian/English dictionary (not even sure if it exists or that I can find anything up-to-date) to figure out what the translator meant.

We have an "Academy of Persian Language and Literature" which comes up with "Persian" terms/words for most things but a lot of them will almost hardly ever be used even on public television which is (almost) entirely operated by the government itself.

I remember 11 years ago when I attempted to register a company there which the name had to be made-up of a minimum of 3 words and that I had chosen "digital" as one. They rejected the my request and asked me to use the equivalent term which wasn't even Persian and came from Arabic and that no-one even uses today. At the same time I remember there was a national competition about "digital" media with ads running on every tv channel using the exact word "digital" in them... Sent an email to the president of that academy which comes up with these translations and rules (also chairman of the parliament at that time) expressing my feeling, obviously never got a response nor anything changed. I never registered their proposed version as it would've just been a laughing stock had I gone with it.

This question actually shocked me.

At least as East Asian ppl who speak Chinese, Korean or Japanese etc, it's way easier for us to discuss CS (or anything else) in native languages.

I think this difficulty only exists in certain western languages.

The conversation is quite mixed up in Startups where I'm from. In enterprise it's mostly native language. Depending on where you work one or the other will sound strange to you.

I'll put some examples on my native language: Spanish (I'm from Argentina).

Enterprise: "Pensamos desplegar a producción este Sábado". Startup: "Pensamos deployar a prod este Sábado" (deployar => to deploy).

In the startup scene there are lot of English terms commonly used: "logueado" (to be logged in), "rollbackear" (to rollback), feature, endpoint, queries, cache, "checkear" (to check). Some of them are used to sound cool, other just because it's easier.

Lately I'm trying to stop mixing things up and I notice it brings a certain deep to my understanding of things. As if something is lost in translation.

I can recall in 1998 I was studying in Germany, taking a semester break from my CS studies. For the fun of it, I checked out the books being used by the CS program - all the textbooks were in English, and I then learned that in that program, most of the classes themselves were conducted in English as well. I know since then that English has become common in courses in many universities in Germany, but at the time it was just a sign of things to come. As other commenters have expressed - it's a vocabulary problem. If there isn't an accepted translation into another language, than the English term will stand (assuming it is the originating language for the concept).

We used German for everything in my undergrad courses. Germany seems to have its own proud CS culture, haha.

We have "Informatik" which comes in the flavours:

Theoretische Informatik, which is low-level Computer Science, think information theory.

Praktische Informatik, which is high-level Comouter Science, like programming language design and software architecture.

Angewandte Informatik, which is software development, like apps, databases etc.

Technische Informatik, which is computer engineering.

And then, of course, we have a never ending count of cross cutting CS degrees like: Medieninformatik, Bioinformatik, Wirtschaftsinformatik, Medizininformatik, etc.

This all has to be mentally moved into the right English equivalent and then translated.

I guess the main issue is that languages outside of English generally don't have equivalent words for all of CS terms. I always have trouble explaining what I do (software engineering) in French without resorting to using English words, just because most words don't exist in French, or they don't mean exactly what you mean.

This reminds me that I can't stand people coding in languages other than English. Variable names/comments in French? No thanks.

As a fellow swede, I don't feel any compelling need to switch languages for discussing CS topics. On the contrary I'm rather sick of speaking other peoples languages after many years abroad and in international organizations. I try to use Swedish translation of concepts, when there are natural and intelligible ones available.

If there isn't a good direct translation available, just force a bit of swedish morphology onto the english root and everything flows. In some ways this makes our language richer and more specific than the one we borrow from. For us "mejl" is unambigous, whereas "mail" in english is not.

As a bonus, given an appropriate context, version control in Swedish is a cornucopia of innuendo.

I often use English CS terms prefixed/suffixed for Russian inflection embedded in a grammatically correct Russian sentence. (Russian is very flexible at adopting foreign roots within in its grammatical framework.)

There are "official" Russian translations of most CS terminology, but they often feel too long, too formal for casual conversation, or sometimes even too ambiguous.

Heh, this is fun. I learned a lot about functional programming while studying in Germany, so my first exposure to a lot of words was German. But they are mostly small adaptations of the English terms (monad == die Monade) anyway.

Fun fact: the professor taught the whole lecture in German but wrote definitions in English on the board (while simultaneously speaking German).

I'm German. theoretical CS and maths terms are no problem because they all have a German equivalent. More programming related lingo is more difficult because it's so heavily dominated by the anglosphere that I (and a lot of people I know) just adopt the english phrases. Like git vocabulary or language related stuff.

My mother tongue is Malagasy, the official language of Madagascar alongside French.

Discussing CS or any other scientific matters in that language at least in my opinion is theoretically possible as there is a book on the Java programming language written in Malagasy. I have made some attempts myself trying to explain Python on the Malagasy Wikibooks [1] and on the Malagasy Wikipedia as well [2].

So yes, formally it _is_ possible. There is quite an extensive vocabulary pertaining to mathematics [3] as well, most of which having been crafted in the 70s and 80s as part of a nationwide effort to use Malagasy academically. The beauty of it is that they consist of native words as well as "malagasized" words.

In practice, sadly, it never happens. All university courses are taught in French, if not in English for the most advanced ones. And no company that I've heard of use Malagasy as a formal working language :(

[1] https://mg.wikibooks.org/wiki/Python

[2] https://mg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solosaina

[3] http://kajy.blogspot.com/2011/04/ireo-voambolana-matematika-...

A resounding "nope" for me. Not because my native language lacks the vocabulary, but rather because I only learned CS in English and because Hong Kong.

My mother tongue is Cantonese, but I was schooled for the better part of my life in Montreal, Canada. So when it comes to anything academic, I can only communicate in English or French. I learned Software Engineering at Concordia University, which is English-speaking.

I now live and work in Hong Kong, but Hong Kong being Hong Kong, we still mostly use English verbs and nouns for anything IT, even though the rest of the sentence could be in Cantonese. e.g. we would say "我將啲change commit咗啦，push埋上GitHub個repo度啦。"

The above sentence would mean "I've already committed the changes, and even pushed them to the repo on GitHub."

In my mother tongue, of course we have all the properly translated words for the above:

- change: 修改 or 改動

- commit: 提交

- push: 推

- (versioning) repo: 版本庫

We even have nouns for queues (隊列), linked lists (連接表), stacks (盞), etc.

We just never use them except outside of academic literature in Chinese.

About the only exception is the word for a generic "computer", which is "電腦" (literally "electric brain") in full or just "腦" (“brain") in short. E.g. ”你部腦呢？" ("Where is your comp?")

I am a native Sinhalese, and I can speak Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) and Tamil.

No, we cannot use native languages for CS. For Sinhalese, there is an on-going attempt to invent words or rather put words together to translate a technical term to Sinhalese, but nobody can figure it out. "Download", for example, is literally translated to a word that doubles as taking something down via a crane, and it has become a sort of a joke that the linguistics even attempted to translate.

However, in Sri Lanka, English is one of the official languages and university courses are in English, even the non-CS majors. Professionally, pretty much every company is using English for both team and client communication.

Other than a few starter YouTubers, I have yet to see anyone meaningfully using Sinhalese in CS.

It is a similar situation in Indonesia too, although more Indonesian words are used. Indonesian itself is rather limited due to its limited nature, and borrows many of the words from English and Dutch. The former languages in the archipelago such as Javanese and Sundanese tend to be quite limited for technical literature, but rich with grammar and meaning.

Swede here. Never felt hindered by Swedish but with very few exceptions domain-specific terms will be English words (resulting in beautiful Swenglish/svengelska).

“Najs refactor, men kan du rebasa dina commits innan vi mergar till masterbranchen?”

(Written documentation, commit messages etc will always be in English though)

I saw your post on the same topic on Kodapor and I think it’s just a matter of you having had way more exposure in CS through English and therefore being more fluent in English in those contexts. There’s nothing in the Swedish language that would make it less powerful than English, as long as you’re willing to borrow vocabulary. The medical field has been doing this with latin for ages - loads of Latin words but nobody’s actually speaking Latin.

There are a few words that still feel natural to translate: Kompilator (compiler), kluster (cluster), minne (memory), binär (binary), etc. But for the most part it just feels forced and confusing to resist mixing in foreign words.

In Russia people don't switch to English to discuss CS, but the whole CS jargon is stuffed with loanwords from English. It normally goes well, Russian is quite flexible with adapting foreign words to its own grammar.

What was painful for me is writing about CS in the university (master thesis, some papers to local journals etc). In Russia you are not allowed to write your university contributions in English, apparently because some of your older supervisors will be uncomfortable with reading it. Also you can't use jargon, because university is a serious business, everything should sound very scientific. So I had to invent my own translations of all the terms of interest, and then put the English word in parentheses, so that reader has at least a slightest chance to understand what I'm writing about.

Yes, and I think English native speakers have more trouble discussing CS because they have to share the common and CS lexicon in the same language.

We can simply take what we want from English and incorporate it to our languages as specialized terms just as they do with Latin and Greek. I see this as a privilege.

These days yes, mostly. Mind you, I studied abroad and when I graduated and first moved back, that really want the case. I remember in my first job, my tech lead explaining how I had to do something, and he said something along the lines of "so you take all of those and shove them into an array" in our native language (Bulgarian). I shaked my head in approval, having absolutely no clue what on earth an "array" was. I checked it in Google translate 5 minutes later and realized I'd have to learn a ton of terminology. Eventually I caught up more or less, though ~10 years later I still get surprised about some terms and expressions occasionally. I'm still far from being able to freely describe and explain stuff in academic terms in my language.

We have a publicly accessible dictionary online for CS terms (as well as generalized IT terms) in Icelandic but more often then not, people have no idea what I am talking about if I even attempt to use any of them in any type of communication.

Most if not all Icelandic terms in the CS vocabulary are created from our own langue (through combination of other words or by generating new ones) rather then adopting them from foreign language.

This makes the usage of them rather limited in such a small society, so most people in the CS community aren't even exposed to them.

Page is accessible at https://tos.sky.is

CS in Chinese is mostly discussed in Chinese language, though we also like to use some English word. But trust me, it is at most 5% or even less. And it’s not rare to read article all in Chinese. And there are even programming languages in Chinese.

I think it’s because the level of abstraction with CS is so high, that it’s very hard to communicate these ideas without having a shared vocabulary. This happens to be English for most of the world.

I grew up in Germany, but have been in the US for close to a decade now and all my technical education has been here. I have tried sending technical emails in German, but it's usually an absolute disaster. I have no Frome of reference for how to actually express things correctly. I also find my non-technical written German to have suffered quite a bit. Spoken word is fine, but writing is a bit tough. I guess I just didn't do any of that for a good ten years, so it got a bit rusty.

India;

CS or mostly any other higher education is English.

It is really hard to translate things into many languages we have here (Especially South India). If done, they will be mostly Sanskrit terms that are still quite harder to understand.

I think everything being in English is a virtue because of seemless interop with the Internet (which is mostly English).

Even when technical topics are conversed in native languages, the terms are mostly English.

Nope, same problem. One issue I had was that I converted a lot of English terms into "italianized" (I'm from Italy) terms, where the word would be still English but with some suffix to change the attributes of the word, that are in italian. This was even more problematic because now you needed to know both English and Italian to understand what I was saying. A teacher did complain about it.

The majority of the books I was reading on the topic were written in English so the conversion did take a lot of effort.

I decided to just use English if the context is CS (well, now my job).

One big problem is that software developers in Italy write code in Italian.

I figured out early the reasons for not doing so, but this wasn't shared. I'm in an English speaking country now, so I never solved the problem effectively. Or I did, since I just use English everywhere at work

It's a big problem in the three nationalist east Asian countries, Japan, Korea and now less so China. As well as Germany. They still insist to invent their own terms and stick to it. It's sometimes very hard to find out what they really mean, esp. if they refuse to tell you the common English term. China got much better recently, you see a big difference to Korea and Japan. Koreans and Germans at least speak a lot of english, but in Japan it's extremely hard if they would not use so many imported terms. Which helps. Germans even refuse that and come up with their own silly superlong monster words for simple terms.

When discussing things with coworkers for example, all or almost all CS terminology is in English, but those get incorporated in otherwise Dutch text. Grammar, non-CS-specific vocabulary is all in Dutch.

Comments and variable names in code are all in English.

I have no trouble discussing it concepts in Swedish. As long as you accept some creative translations you can find perfectly fine Swedish words. And if you can't, just invent new ones. I.e "Reverted the last change set because of strange exceptions." -> "Återställde senaste ändringen pga konstiga undantag." "Please rebase the branch to the master branch before sending a pull request." -> "Se till så att spåret utgår från huvudspåret innan du begär spårhämtning." Not a literal translation but it doesn't have to be.

In Israel, some people with technological army background or academic background, use Hebrew terms for CS. In the industry though (especially in the startup scene) English terms are more commonly used. There is a hybrid of English terms with Hebrew morphology. For example: "To merge" becomes "Le-marge-ge" (למרג׳ג׳) even though there is a Hebrew word for this action "Le-mazeg" (למזג). But as far as I'm aware studies for BCS are done mostly in Hebrew.

I can, and it feels normal to discuss CS in my native language which is French, which already includes many English words. Imho the downside of not using English lies in the keyboard layout. Many programs are designed to make sense with an English Layout e.g Vim. But writing accents with the US international Layout is a PITA (compared to French Layout), I ended up being a "bilingual" typist.

Actually I can't. It would just sound so strange to me talking about branches, trees, traversal, cache lines, threads, forking and killing processes and so in all the non-English languages that I speak or understand.

It would seem to my brain as if I talking about those actual things and not the abstract CS concepts i.e. saying "a tree" in would just make it seem we talking about actual green trees outside so I'd start laughing probably.

I speak Indonesian and used to work in Jakarta. Discussions usually used Indonesian language, but jargon and technical terms were always in English. Some terms were just Indonesian-ised English words (like aplikasi - which I’m sure most English speakers could guess the meaning of). I found other terms did have proper Indonesian words, but they were super esoteric and never used.

My university tried to teach in German. Complete insanity.

We where puzzling way too long what "Reihung" or "Rahmenwerk" mean.

What a fascinating question. I'm originally from Italy, studied CS in an Italian university and only briefly at UC Irvine (California). I've left Italy 12 years ago and worked for American corporations or startups since.

I am terrible at discussing CS in my native language. Even with fellow Italians, I stay with English as much as possible.

Most of CS terms in Russian are loanwords from English with the same meaning but slightly different pronunciation.

No, it is impossible to talk about CS in Greek. I must ALWAYS switch to English.

As an Albanian, no. Discussing more complex CS topics is not pleasant at all.

Swede as well and practically my whole career have been abroad. Some year ago I was interviewed by another Swede and we opted to do it In English.

I’d probably be able to, but I’d have to fall back on English at points.

You can do it in Spanish, but there's a lot of vocabulary that either sounds really weird when translated or there's not a translation. So we use English words mixed in the discourse.

I speak fluent Korean & learned CS in English. And nope. I can't discuss CS in Korean.

I don't know many terms and they are utterly confusing.

Korean terms for CS sounds too academic.

Russian/Ukrainian: almost impossible. It sounds like english anyway, as more than every other word is english.

For those who discuss CS in their native languages, how many of you also name variables using your native language too?

It would be pretty much impossible to talk about CS in Polish as even the universities teach CS classes in English.

Yes, I can and do discuss computer science in Korean.

My native language is spanish, and while I obviously have discussions with colleagues in spanish we constantly weave english terms in our talks.

In fact, friends and girlfriends outside the industry have always laughed at the fact that when I talk with coworkers half the words we use are in english.

Why? Well, it's NOT only a vocabulary problem as others have said. Some terms are untranslatable, yes, but also every good documentation or resource you come across will be in english, code itself is in english, and so I spend 90% of my day THINKING in english. We end up using english expressions that have nothing to do with programming during regular conversation.