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Comment by wishinghand | Hacker News Reader

I’m curious as to why master and branch are borrowed rather than translated. Those seem straightforward enough to translate. But then again, I don’t speak German and I’m not a linguist.

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I am a native German speaker and developer. Literally every resource I look up on the internet concerning my work I look up in English. I actually start thinking about my problems in English.

When MDN shows me content in German the first thing I do is switch to English to lower the cognitive load.

I can just speak for myself, but jumping back and forth between two languages is adding unnecessary cognitive load.

I also never ever heard someone talk about the "Meisterzweig" in a Git repository.

I also immediately switch to the English version of any documentation. Worst offender here is the MS knowledge base with it’s really bad auto-translations.

For me part of the reason most people use English in CS boils down to the English textbooks being better.

Probably because github and stackoverflow write them in English ;)

Also there is no need to translate technical lingo if everybody understands it. More general IT terms are translated sometimes (e.g. hard disk = Festplatte, keyboard = tastatur). I'm sure a linguist could explain why it happens in some cases and not in others.

Croatian here. In the circles I run, everyone says the english variant "branch", even though it could be straightforwardly translated (to "grana"). The reason is the following - when I hear "branch" it evokes the version control concept in my mind. When I hear "grana" it evokes the part of the tree or bush. So, we use "branch".

And if I were to try to translate "master", it would end up translated as a word that could be equally well translated back to English as "lord", which is just silly.

It strikes me that by reserving “grana” for branch of a tree, and “branch” for source code branch, you have created a more precise language than English for these concepts.

For those specifically: Because those are the names the tools use, and it'd be annoying to talk using one word, turn around and type a different word in the terminal.

Generally, abstract or mathematical concepts tend to have German words, but even those aren't always used. Things specific to tools/technologies typically don't, and few bother coming up with German equivalents. And German doesn't mind integrating other words, even mixing them in compound nouns with German ones.

I think younger people (who mostly speak english as well) are less concerned about borrowing or code switching, whereas older people (who may have lower levels of english skills) may have wanted to stick to all-German, resulting in such backporting as “hereunderladen”.

People like to use the terms/style they are most familiar with. (See also: how über/ueber turned into “uber” in english.)

I think the age of the term and the age of the speaker matter a lot.

Well, these have become technical terms sufficiently abstracted from their general sense that people have no problems borrowing the terminology from a different language. In fact English is a worse offender when it comes to these things, e.g. hydrogen for waterstuff.

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