Pros and cons of Localisation of technical words?

Question

This question is directed to the non-english speaking people here.

It is somewhat biased because SO is an "english-speaking" web forum, so... In the other hand, most developers would know english anyway...

In your locale culture, are technical words translated into locale words ? For example, how "Design Pattern", or "Factory", or whatever are written/said in german, spanish, etc. etc. when used by IT? Are the english words prefered? The local translation? Do the two version (english/locale) are evenly used?

Edit

Could you write with your answer the locale translation of "Design Pattern"?

In french, according to Wikipedia.fr, it is "Patron de conception", which translates back as "Model of Conceptualization" (I guess).

Answer 1

We do have some odd mix here in Brazil. Many books are translated into Portuguese, but the originals are commonly avaliable too. Mix that with the Internet and basically everybody has to know the terms in both languages, because you never know how the next person will reference them. And till recently most translations were conducted by some folks not linked with IT in any way. Some terms are simply bad translated.

Design Pattern is a good example. The GoF book is called "Padrões de Projeto". But projeto means project too. So most people do call it Design Patterns, but call the patterns with translated names (Fábrica Abstrata instead of Abstract Factory, Fachada instead of Facade). And I have seen people call Design Patterns as "Padrões de Desenho", as some do think desenho (means design too, but also draw) reflect better the design phase of a software development.

While I do see value in translate some terms to make the conversation more fluent (many, many brazilians have some trouble with the 'th' words. The phonem just doesn't exist in portuguese...), this commonly cause misunderstandings when somebody just hasn't been exposed to some obscure translation. It's obviously better to sticky with the original terms. And be very strict to, when the need to use a translation exist, do not choose a obscure translation.

Answer 2

Coming from Switzerland and speaking German I vote for keeping them in English. I have been at an IBM congress some time back (OS/2 0.9 developpers conference, I0m giving away my age here). At that time most people were not as familiar with the names of interface components (combobox, listbox, button) as they are today, especially not the many mainframe programmers attending.

So everything was translated simultaniously into different languages. And i mean everything. This let to the effect that:

• A wrong standard set of names was put in place
• Programmers from different nations were not able to talk to each other
• It was really hard to follow the talks, especially if you had some previous knowledge

The only way to go about was to have one ear covered with the headphones while listening to the English original speach and trying to put the English names of things in the right spot in the German translation. It was so tyring.

Answer 3

I am from Austria, hence learned German as first language.

Design Pattern becomes 'Entwurfsmuster' which is a pretty decent translation not losing that much in translation, still we all use the English 'original' here in Austria, even people speaking an awful English use the English words. Makes it easier....

For completeness: it is not completely right, that only the rest of the world is using English terms, 'you' also use some 'foreign' words:

• (my favorite:) Gedankenexperiment seems to be well known
• eigenvalues and eigenvectors in math
• Kindergarden is related to the German Kindergarten

And recentry i stumbeled upon a site called: übernote from the German word über.

Answer 4

You can translate words to another language, but you are usually not translating the mindset they belong to (that's why good translations cost a lot of money). Technical terms that build an obvious group in one language may also lose their linguistic connection in other languages.

One of the worst examples I stumble upon regularly is the word 'experience' that is rampant in U.S. marketing lingo. Everything is an experience nowadays. Now some folks translate it into German "Erfahrung", and it just sounds terrible because it does not fit with anything in the German mindset. We don't think of using a tool or software as an Erfahrung. The word may be translated correctly, but completely off the mark considering the mindset.

Edit answer: German for "design pattern" is Entwurfsmuster. It's sometimes used in lectures and presentations. My almost daily fun event is the translation of English "to cast" as germanized verb "casten". As casting in C/C++ has been considered evil for quite some time and causes lots of bugs, "casten" is usually a problem. Now "casten" sounds phonetically identical to German first name "Karsten". So whenever casting is the cause of an error I can remark that it has all been caused by Karsten ;)

Answer 5

No thanks. Leave the English technical terms be. Translation is awkward, generally ugly and confusing.

Sometimes I have the opposite problem, here in Italy. You try not to mix english and italian... so methods and classes are named "findUserBySocialSecurityNumber", "delete", and so on. But business terms are often impossible to translate (italian unique identifying code is "Codice Fiscale", which is not a social security number or anything), so it's not unusual to meet methods named "findUserByCodiceFiscale", which I admit is pretty silly. :)

EDIT: design pattern in Italian might be translated schemi di progettazione (or struttura di progettazione, according to Wikipedia), but I've never heard it in conversations.

Answer 6

Most IT staff in Poland use english terms, polish language is used only when communicating with business or users.

Personally I tend to set locale on all my computers to english - I know which word is used in english manual, but I'm not sure how was it translated in polish version.

On my university all of lectures were in polish, sometimes we had no idea when tutor used some translated terminology (like "kompilator skrośny" [cross compiller] or "krotka" [record in a database]).

"Design Patterns" translated to polish is "wzorce projektowe".

Answer 7

In my technical blog everything is translated in french. Using english words for computing, just because most of the concepts behind were invented in the USA would be as stupid as using only german words for printing (because of Gutenberg) or greek words for politics.

Of course, like any rule, there are exceptions. It is sometimes difficult to find a good translation (I use "bit" and "pizza", not the french translation). And it is better to have no translation than a bad one (such as "toile" for "web", a serious translation error).