On Saturday, 9 November 2013 at 08:32:24 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
Given French's more limited vocabulary and resistance to adding
new words,
translating technical terms has got to be a royal pain (and
then L'Académie
Française gets ticked when folks use English words for new
stuff). I had my
desktop in French for a while at one point, which definitely
improved my
vocabulary. For better or worse, a lot of technical words seem
to get
translated very literally, which gets interesting sometimes
(particularly when
there doesn't seem to really be a direct translation
available). But I expect
that it's often the same in other languages, though maybe some
of them are
more open to just using the English word.
I can tell you that when I talk about programming or computers in
Swedish I use a lot of English words. Many words don't have a
good translation and just sound weird. If I would to translate
"slice" into Swedish it would probably be "skiva", especially if
we're talking about a slice of bread. But if I would say "skiva"
when talking about programming to someone else they would
probably say "WHAT?" and have no idea what I'm talking about.
I'm using all my software in English. One time I was going to use
Photoshop at school and they had the Swedish version. I couldn't
find a single thing by looking at the names. Just hoping you're
remembering the locations of the buttons and the menus.
--
/Jacob Carlborg
