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"Rechner" and "Computer" are interchangeable and probably used equally frequently, as are "Hauptspeicher" and "RAM", etc. Some words do seem to be mainly referred to by their German names ("Betriebssystem", "Datenbank"), while for many others, I'm not aware of any German equivalent in common usage ("event sourcing", "operations", "pull/merge request", "branch", ...).

Sometimes, in university courses I've seen German names for things I had only ever heard the English term of. I suspect almost nobody in the industry actually uses these German terms.

So, not everything is in German. I guess it's probably mostly the stuff that's been around a long time that has acquired a German name, but newer tech is typically referred to by English terminology.

I also agree with my sibling commentor that dismissing a culture because they don't exclusively use English terminology is silly. The German language certainly didn't stop Niklaus Wirth (who was from Switzerland and spoke German) from winning the Turing Award.

I have a degree in CS, from a Polish university, and virtually all the course material was in Polish. That's a legal requirement, since I signed up for a degree taught in Polish, and I can't be expected to speak English, even though I would be useless in real life if I didn't. An English version would be available, but it would probably be painful, considering how bad some of the teachers are at short phrases, let alone a semester's worth of lectures.

Similarly, all my direct coworkers speak Polish, and that's the language we use to talk about technical matters. We do use English words randomly, and our code (comments and variables) and docs are in English, but nobody is complaining about people using their native language.

You're confusing two deferent things. I was talking about the language of technical IT terms, not which language you use at the course/school/university as of course that will almost always be the local language out of legal requirements.

In your Polish courses do you use translated Polish words for all the IT technical terms, or the original English ones?

It's a mix. General terms will be usually in Polish, in some older textbooks or other materials you can encounter really different terms that relate to different era.

Things like "Zbiór danych" (or just "zbiór") instead of "plik" - which translate to "data set" Vs "file"

What are examples of technical IT terms you use in English instead of translating them?

I also have a degree in CS from a Polish university, but my degree was actually taught in English.

I had a pretty good understanding of CS before I started college, so I assumed that a degree in English would be better because of how prevalent English is in this field. I... was wrong.

Most professors were not great at speaking the language. Funnily enough, the average student, whether Polish or otherwise, was far better at it than the average professor. Most of the course materials we had were direct translations of their Polish equivalents, usually done by the professors themselves, despite the fact that far higher-quality materials in English were available on the internet. Some of the translations were subtly wrong, one professor consistently used compresion[sic] when he actually meant conversion and twice when he meant times. I've even seen words, error messages and documentation snippets that were translated to Polish in the original materials, and then (badly) translated back to English.

> Germany is still a conservative digital dinosaur underneath

Using one’s native language as opposed to English is sufficient to make one a “conservative digital dinosaur”?

I think your conclusion is correct, but I don’t think this Anglocentric argument is the reason why.

In a way it makes it harder to then learn further on later, something required in IT.

I studied IT in Sweden and all the course material is in English. MS books, Linux books, Cisco CCNA books etc.

I imagine, as I can't compare, that this makes it easier to learn further in IT, and participate in communities such as this.

>Using one’s native language as opposed to English is sufficient to make one a “conservative digital dinosaur”?

That's just my opinion based on personal experience, which can't be right or wrong because like I said, it's an opinion and not a fact.

From what I saw, yes it kinda is. I'm from eastern Europe originally, and here we learn CS and everything IT related directly in English, even though we have our own words for the technical terms, nobody's using them and we just default to the English words. If you go to the Nordics or everything north of Netherlands including them, everyone is schooled in English as well when it comes to IT.

It's mostly Austria, Germany, France and few other conservative countries who insist on using their local language for IT terms out of national pride or something, as using too much English is seen as an defeat/attack on their culture.

The US is the only country that insists on using systems of units that nobody else is using and that hasn't stopped it from becoming an economical juggernaut.

> That's just my opinion based on personal experience, which can't be right or wrong

I think yours is actually a (theoretically) falsifiable theory about cause and effect, so it can be right or wrong.

I can't agree. It's not about national pride, IMO, but about the organic development of the language. Some of these terms date back to the pre-war period, think of the Zuse-1 era.

Many IT words that used to be German were replaced by English words if they were shorter ("Direktzugriffsspeicher" => RAM) or easier to pronounce ("Hauptplatine" => Mainboard), and e.g. OS is a common abbreviation in German for "Betriebssystem" because it is shorter - but "operating system" is not, so why switch? There is no upside, so the language didn't evolve that way.

Use Windows or Linux in German, directories are called "Ordner" - why would you teach "folder" instead if the course is in German?

> It's mostly Austria, Germany, France and few other conservative countries who insist on using their local language for IT terms out of national pride or something, as using too much English is seen as an defeat/attack on their culture.

I think it is more awareness of the fortune of cultural diversity.

No offense but that's just American centrism at play. Lingua franca of computing is English, everyone should just learn "the human language" and it'll save everyone's times, computer runs in English, everything should translate clean from English, etc etc.

There's nothing wrong in using local languages. Speaking not-English is not bad. Many go for English because there's a lot of money to chase in the market, not because it's objectively right by some truth of this universe.

>who insist on using their local language for IT terms out of national pride or something

We'are a nation with a IT sector, not an IT sector that happens to hve a nation attached to it. Using English is fine, but education and business in Germany must be available to everyone in German and that's why it needs to be taught. We can speak more than one language, so making sure that our culture and language is preserved and speaking English aren't mutually exlusive.

There are many European countries, smaller ones especially, seriously at risk of losing their language and culture.

> My cousin in Germany is doing a 1-year long IT schooling course (going from how a PC works, how Win and Linux work, Shell/PS scripting to python and AWS) and the course material has all the technical terms in German: "Rechner", "Speicher", Ordner", "Betriebssystem", instead of Computer, Memory, Folder, Operating system.

Those are established popular terms with nearly half a century of usage. Newer or less popular terms are often just English.

> Almost nothing from the course material is in English, which was shocking to me

Maybe you don't see it? What about shell, cloud, webservice, etc. Is there something about router, switch, smartphone, microservice, AI? Ai is a pretty funny case, as there is a German term for it (KI), but in the new hype now, it's barely used at all, even in academics.

> So despite the new clothing, Germany is still a conservative digital dinosaur underneath

It's not conservative to have your own culture and history.

>It's not conservative to have your own culture and history.

Relax, nobody's saying to take your beer and Lederhosen away, but why force your own translations to established industry technical words onto students?

It just creates confusion and hampers further self learning and cooperation as the lingua franca of IT is Englisch anyway.

TBH, if a student lacks the brain capacity to translate German technical terms to English in a course that's held in German language then I would question the fitness of said student for a technical job in general.

It's not a job, it's a course. Not everyone attending such a course is fluent bilingual.

But that's beside the point.

The original point we if the vast majority of the technical IT jargon is English anyway why do you also need to change them to German for a course or industry? Why not keep those words in English?

I don't think you understand how languages work. Nobody sat down and "decided" to use German words instead of English ones (maybe that's what happened with the Académie Française, but that's a different topic). Those German terms have been in use for decades.

Are you going to force UK speakers to say truck, fall and cookie, too?

>I don't think you understand how languages work.

I'm not talking about languages, I'm talking about the specific words of IT jargon which all originate from English.

>Are you going to force UK speakers to say truck, fall and cookie, too?

No, because those words are not universally used technical IT words bound together by a common language.

With your logic then every country should translate the mnemonics of the programing languages from English to their local languages too, no?

So the "while()" loop will be "während()" in German version of C and "pendant()" in French version of C.

> I'm not talking about languages, I'm talking about the specific words of IT jargon which all originate from English.

"I'm not talking about languages, I'm talking about words" ...? What do you think words are a part of

> With your logic then every country should translate the mnemonics of the programing languages from English to their local languages too, no?

Programming languages are not natural languages. The comparison doesn't make sense.

Devils advocate, but I code using US spelling for variable names, and avoid using Imperial terms to US English speakers because if they can't wrap their minds around me being in the southern hemisphere and my summer being their winter, they won't be able to cope with "capsicum".

> Are you going to force UK speakers to say truck, fall and cookie, too?

No, but it's pretty typical to see Brits talk about datacenters, computer programs and sometimes even catalogs, as opposed to datacentres, computer programmes and catalogues.

What confusion? There are now multiple generations who have learned those terms, somehow nobody ever seems to have a problem with them.

What about the generation learning it now from scratch?

KI is used by the media, including by a kids focused radio station, Toggo Radio, that my kids love.

They have well written news segments where it comes up relatively frequently at the moment. I don't have cause to talk much about AI to my kids yet so time will tell which terminology they adopt.

I have one memory from university just burned into my head and will most likely never forget it. During a course on operating systems, I got increasingly confused by the prof talking about "Speicherkacheln", which translates to "memory tiles" - i.e. small tiles you'd glue to a wall in a bathroom.

It took me a hilarious amount of time to realize he was talking about mem pages. Many things about that lecture fell into place once that clicked.

Later on, especially the newer courses, had no qualms about just keeping english terms around, or at least made sure to include the english terms though. All of the interesting research happened internationally anyway.

So despite the new clothing, Germany is still a conservative digital dinosaur underneath, pretending to be cool and modern. "How do you do fellow Kinder?"[1]

It's funny to me how German speakers thing it's cool and modern to use English words throughout their German. But when I as a native English speaker read Denglish, it looks about as cool as socks w/ sandals.