Italian native, working in English in Germany: I would pick English over Italian every day to do anything or discuss anything technical.
Also Italian has this weird grammatical quirk where every 300 hundred words you have to stop, offer a coffee to the other speaker and then go actually take it at a bar because the one at the machine sucks. I’m caffeine-free so you can see how this wouldn’t work out.
My limited experience 20y ago was that Italians, just like Germans, have translated a lot of technical terms and insist on using them, so even if you could have a conversation with your every day language skills, there are suddenly new technical terms you’ve never heard. Not sure how common that is in professional software development circles though. In German it seems to get better, but back in the 90s/early 00s some of our teachers and professors insisted on the German versions of e.g. Heap, Stack, FSM, and a million more - whereas others had accepted that English is the lingua franca.
In my experience as an Italian who’s been writing code professionally for a couple years, people out of university tend to use a lot more translated terms, and depending on the environment they shift towards English terms over time. If you’re not used to it you’ll hear tons of stuff that will have you do a double take, and every new team you work with will use its own melange of Italian and English terms to say the same things.
I learned programming entirely in English and didn’t have a deep conversation about it in Italian until I started working so this was kind of a culture shock for me, but I’ve grown accustomed to it after a while.
As said by @steinuil it’s mostly a uni thing. There are some translations that happen but I believe French or Germans are worse. Italians in IT actually use waaaaaay too much English and they are made fun of by normal people.
One funfact about Italian IT and bad translations: Italians translated “port” as “porta” (door) instead of “porto” (port). So most Italians probably visualize doors or little holes with data going through, instead of harbours you use to land.
Yeah, I didn’t want to make the impressions that the Germans aren’t worse ;) I also think it’s mostly some people at uni who feel the need to teach a language that no one in the industry speaks - no idea bout academia.
Funny story: I was born and raised in a French household, went to French schools until my masters, yet I’ve been told by a few people in town that they thought I was a native English speaker because I’ve apparently developed an accent when I speak French—likely from working in English companies and having an Anglophone family—and I now find it more difficult to find the right words in French than in English.
I can relate to that. Spanish speaker, living and working in English for the last third of my life: communication in my mother tongue has become often a challenge because I tend to forget expressions that use uncommon words that I used to know or feel more natural using English (expressions that I use all the time). At this point I start to believe I am forgetting it.
I’m Croatian, and even though my English is flawed, I’m doing quite fine, better then a lot non-English speakers in it.I rarely have to look for words or expressions, I’m mostly even thinking in English if I’m speaking English.
But I moved to Germany recently and with German, is a huge effort. I feel after 8 years I can do okay, but after a long day of taking in German, I feel mentally exhausted.
But the funniest thing is, I’m now sometimes getting stuck with my English, because I’m looking how to translate something from German, not from Croatian! I don’t know why is that, but it’s very interesting.
I often get people very confused as to where I’m from, as when I speak English I have a weird mixture of accents. I have my native accent in my native language (Welsh) still, but don’t get to use it often, as I live in Norway. So at some point, I managed to pick up some accents that can’t be placed, and I’m not really sure how that happened.It doesn’t bother me much, it’s fun to hear people guess all the random places they think I’m from.
The big downside is that people assume I’m a native English speaker, and they’re surprised when I tell them that I did all my education up to university in Welsh. It took me a long time to learn how to write properly in English.
In my experience it is not as much about the native/non-native divide, but more about being the odd one out.
Groups of humans are surprisingly good at creating their own version of a language when it is necessary. They establish their own “standard” way of conveying something that is tuned to the groups needs. In IT it is often some bastardized version of English. I have experienced this many times, but it always has been in groups of very mixed nationalities. It “just” works then. However a native speaker would have been horrified to listen to those conversations. (And would probably be the one writing a post like this.)
As someone who only speaks English I try to be as empathetic as I can, and I admire colleagues who do this because working asynchronously on complex technical stuff is already tricky enough. It’s rare in my experience, but it does happen that the language barrier causes some confusion.
We’ve always worked it out, but there was one time in particular that someone I was working with used some English idiom and confused “up” with “down” in some idiom, or something like that. The result was that, taken at face value, their words conveyed the opposite of what they meant. I stopped to double check that they meant what I thought, and after they clarified I also mentioned the correct use of the idiom. Then I complimented their English.
I’ve always felt a little weird about that, as I could see coming off as condescending. It was in good faith but I feel like it would have been better to just move on. I don’t know. All that is to say, this stuff is hard.
Sorry, I guess I’m still confused then. For you to work in your native language requires empathy… on your part? Someone else’s?
The best I could figure is that you were looking to ask people to be empathetic to people who are speaking their non-native language, but that’s not what the title said, so I’m a bit lost.
The article is directed towards native-English speakers, so My native language == your non-native. I understand the confusion, tho.
Regarding empathy, I think both sides have to be empathic. Working in a second language can be exhausting, and people often feel like they’re less valued, less intelligent or treated differently for speaking “bad English”, so I’m making a case to say that you (non-native speaker) are not alone, and it’s okay to make mistakes. For native speakers, on the other hand, I ask for empathy because you’re an expert on your language, so your very presence can be intimidating to others. Using simpler language, for example, is a way to help foreigners.
I’m all for using simpler language, not just for helping people who are less fluent in a language, but also to reduce the cognitive overhead required to understand what is being said. I’m not a native English speaker either (I’m Dutch), but oftentimes I get annoyed by the horrible ways people use English (even native speakers).
For me, I approach it a bit like a programming language. It’s always good to have empathy towards your fellow developer (they might be tired, overworked or just new to the language), and if people are continually making mistakes it doesn’t make sense to chew them out, because it’s clear they’re at a language level below full mastery. But I still kind of expect a professional who has been in this business for several years to have mastered both English and the programming language at hand.
I’m all for using simpler language, not just for helping people who are less fluent in a language, but also to reduce the cognitive overhead required to understand what is being said
Simpler doesn’t always help. A lot of the complicated words in English are lifted directly from French or Italian and so might be more familiar to a native speaker of another romance language than the more common English terms (I recall a French friend had a habit of just putting French words in his PhD thesis and anglicising the word ending. It worked 90% of the time and was very confusing the few times when it didn’t).
I once tried playing Balderdash with a group of Italian friends and it was no fun at all. You’re presented with an obscure English word and you’re all supposed to make up plausible definitions. You get one point for every person who believes that your definition is the right one. If you write the correct definition then yours is excluded from the ones people guess and you just get two points. Every round, all of them would write the correct definition because the obscure English words were everyday Italian ones.
Even for native speakers, there are a lot of weird dialect variations, especially where one has dropped a word from a common phrase. For example, American dropped the ‘to’ from phrases such as ‘one through to five’ and just says ‘one through five’, which sounds to an English speaker like a sequence that starts at one, continues through five, and then probably stops somewhere later, but to an American means something that stops at five. In contrast, after people in England stoped wearing pantaloons, they stopped using the abbreviation ‘pants’ and so dropped the ‘under’ prefix from ‘underpants’. Americans kept the word ‘pants’ as a synonym for ‘trousers’ and so cause hilarity to English speakers (we’re easily entertained) whenever they refer to their pants. Pants is definitely a simpler word than ‘trousers’, but saying it increases the cognitive load for folks outside of the US, who first have to (by law in the UK) smirk, and then mentally translate.
My experience as an English person is that native English speakers are often worse at speaking our own language than non-native speakers. Working with non-native speakers for my entire career has actually helped me realise where native speakers get lazy in their use of language, or use idioms that don’t translate well (or at all) - sometimes even across different variations of “native English” such as English vs Scottish vs American.
I’m very used to Scandinavians going “sorry, I’m not a native speaker” and delivering perfect English. (Well, it’s perfect until it isn’t - sometimes you can get very interesting mispronunciations.
Italian native, working in English in Germany: I would pick English over Italian every day to do anything or discuss anything technical.
Also Italian has this weird grammatical quirk where every 300 hundred words you have to stop, offer a coffee to the other speaker and then go actually take it at a bar because the one at the machine sucks. I’m caffeine-free so you can see how this wouldn’t work out.
Yeah, I remember getting my first caffeine shakes, after the sixth coffee break working with an Italian. Scary, but good coffee.
My limited experience 20y ago was that Italians, just like Germans, have translated a lot of technical terms and insist on using them, so even if you could have a conversation with your every day language skills, there are suddenly new technical terms you’ve never heard. Not sure how common that is in professional software development circles though. In German it seems to get better, but back in the 90s/early 00s some of our teachers and professors insisted on the German versions of e.g. Heap, Stack, FSM, and a million more - whereas others had accepted that English is the lingua franca.
In my experience as an Italian who’s been writing code professionally for a couple years, people out of university tend to use a lot more translated terms, and depending on the environment they shift towards English terms over time. If you’re not used to it you’ll hear tons of stuff that will have you do a double take, and every new team you work with will use its own melange of Italian and English terms to say the same things.
I learned programming entirely in English and didn’t have a deep conversation about it in Italian until I started working so this was kind of a culture shock for me, but I’ve grown accustomed to it after a while.
As said by @steinuil it’s mostly a uni thing. There are some translations that happen but I believe French or Germans are worse. Italians in IT actually use waaaaaay too much English and they are made fun of by normal people.
One funfact about Italian IT and bad translations: Italians translated “port” as “porta” (door) instead of “porto” (port). So most Italians probably visualize doors or little holes with data going through, instead of harbours you use to land.
Yeah, I didn’t want to make the impressions that the Germans aren’t worse ;) I also think it’s mostly some people at uni who feel the need to teach a language that no one in the industry speaks - no idea bout academia.
Funny story: I was born and raised in a French household, went to French schools until my masters, yet I’ve been told by a few people in town that they thought I was a native English speaker because I’ve apparently developed an accent when I speak French—likely from working in English companies and having an Anglophone family—and I now find it more difficult to find the right words in French than in English.
I can relate to that. Spanish speaker, living and working in English for the last third of my life: communication in my mother tongue has become often a challenge because I tend to forget expressions that use uncommon words that I used to know or feel more natural using English (expressions that I use all the time). At this point I start to believe I am forgetting it.
I’m Croatian, and even though my English is flawed, I’m doing quite fine, better then a lot non-English speakers in it.I rarely have to look for words or expressions, I’m mostly even thinking in English if I’m speaking English. But I moved to Germany recently and with German, is a huge effort. I feel after 8 years I can do okay, but after a long day of taking in German, I feel mentally exhausted.
But the funniest thing is, I’m now sometimes getting stuck with my English, because I’m looking how to translate something from German, not from Croatian! I don’t know why is that, but it’s very interesting.
I often get people very confused as to where I’m from, as when I speak English I have a weird mixture of accents. I have my native accent in my native language (Welsh) still, but don’t get to use it often, as I live in Norway. So at some point, I managed to pick up some accents that can’t be placed, and I’m not really sure how that happened.It doesn’t bother me much, it’s fun to hear people guess all the random places they think I’m from.
The big downside is that people assume I’m a native English speaker, and they’re surprised when I tell them that I did all my education up to university in Welsh. It took me a long time to learn how to write properly in English.
Heh, seems kind of like being Icelandic almost, excpet I also did my bachelors of university in Icelandic.
Not only verbal fluency - there’s a huge amount of small cultural norms and customs that a second language speaker rarely gets to understand easily.
In my experience it is not as much about the native/non-native divide, but more about being the odd one out.
Groups of humans are surprisingly good at creating their own version of a language when it is necessary. They establish their own “standard” way of conveying something that is tuned to the groups needs. In IT it is often some bastardized version of English. I have experienced this many times, but it always has been in groups of very mixed nationalities. It “just” works then. However a native speaker would have been horrified to listen to those conversations. (And would probably be the one writing a post like this.)
As someone who only speaks English I try to be as empathetic as I can, and I admire colleagues who do this because working asynchronously on complex technical stuff is already tricky enough. It’s rare in my experience, but it does happen that the language barrier causes some confusion.
We’ve always worked it out, but there was one time in particular that someone I was working with used some English idiom and confused “up” with “down” in some idiom, or something like that. The result was that, taken at face value, their words conveyed the opposite of what they meant. I stopped to double check that they meant what I thought, and after they clarified I also mentioned the correct use of the idiom. Then I complimented their English.
I’ve always felt a little weird about that, as I could see coming off as condescending. It was in good faith but I feel like it would have been better to just move on. I don’t know. All that is to say, this stuff is hard.
I think I’m missing something. Is English your native language, or Portuguese? Some things in the post aren’t connecting up for me.
Portuguese is my first language.
Sorry, I guess I’m still confused then. For you to work in your native language requires empathy… on your part? Someone else’s?
The best I could figure is that you were looking to ask people to be empathetic to people who are speaking their non-native language, but that’s not what the title said, so I’m a bit lost.
The article is directed towards native-English speakers, so
My native language == your non-native. I understand the confusion, tho.Regarding empathy, I think both sides have to be empathic. Working in a second language can be exhausting, and people often feel like they’re less valued, less intelligent or treated differently for speaking “bad English”, so I’m making a case to say that you (non-native speaker) are not alone, and it’s okay to make mistakes. For native speakers, on the other hand, I ask for empathy because you’re an expert on your language, so your very presence can be intimidating to others. Using simpler language, for example, is a way to help foreigners.
I’m all for using simpler language, not just for helping people who are less fluent in a language, but also to reduce the cognitive overhead required to understand what is being said. I’m not a native English speaker either (I’m Dutch), but oftentimes I get annoyed by the horrible ways people use English (even native speakers).
For me, I approach it a bit like a programming language. It’s always good to have empathy towards your fellow developer (they might be tired, overworked or just new to the language), and if people are continually making mistakes it doesn’t make sense to chew them out, because it’s clear they’re at a language level below full mastery. But I still kind of expect a professional who has been in this business for several years to have mastered both English and the programming language at hand.
Simpler doesn’t always help. A lot of the complicated words in English are lifted directly from French or Italian and so might be more familiar to a native speaker of another romance language than the more common English terms (I recall a French friend had a habit of just putting French words in his PhD thesis and anglicising the word ending. It worked 90% of the time and was very confusing the few times when it didn’t).
I once tried playing Balderdash with a group of Italian friends and it was no fun at all. You’re presented with an obscure English word and you’re all supposed to make up plausible definitions. You get one point for every person who believes that your definition is the right one. If you write the correct definition then yours is excluded from the ones people guess and you just get two points. Every round, all of them would write the correct definition because the obscure English words were everyday Italian ones.
Even for native speakers, there are a lot of weird dialect variations, especially where one has dropped a word from a common phrase. For example, American dropped the ‘to’ from phrases such as ‘one through to five’ and just says ‘one through five’, which sounds to an English speaker like a sequence that starts at one, continues through five, and then probably stops somewhere later, but to an American means something that stops at five. In contrast, after people in England stoped wearing pantaloons, they stopped using the abbreviation ‘pants’ and so dropped the ‘under’ prefix from ‘underpants’. Americans kept the word ‘pants’ as a synonym for ‘trousers’ and so cause hilarity to English speakers (we’re easily entertained) whenever they refer to their pants. Pants is definitely a simpler word than ‘trousers’, but saying it increases the cognitive load for folks outside of the US, who first have to (by law in the UK) smirk, and then mentally translate.
My experience as an English person is that native English speakers are often worse at speaking our own language than non-native speakers. Working with non-native speakers for my entire career has actually helped me realise where native speakers get lazy in their use of language, or use idioms that don’t translate well (or at all) - sometimes even across different variations of “native English” such as English vs Scottish vs American.
I’m very used to Scandinavians going “sorry, I’m not a native speaker” and delivering perfect English. (Well, it’s perfect until it isn’t - sometimes you can get very interesting mispronunciations.
Ahhh, I think I see now. Thanks.