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eru01/18/20252 repliesview on HN

In some sense, these terms are extremely trivial to adapt: the German term for sharding is just a literal borrow, just say 'sharding'.

What's almost impossible to translate are everyday words. German Brot has rather different connotations from the nasty stuff Brits call bread, but I don't think there's a better word available, and a straight-up borrow would feel fairly weird in most context. Much weirder than borrowing 'sharding' in a technical context.

> The only real solution is to adopt them to your language, more or less adapted, which is what happens over time.

You can see some good examples of that when you look at railway related terms in German. They used to be all English, because that's where we got the technology from. But over time they have been replaced with mostly German native-looking terms. (Well, native looking, but many of them like Lokomotive re-created from the same borrowing from Greek or Latin as in English. But eg station is now Bahnhof. And train is Zug.)


Replies

propter_hoc01/18/2025

> German Brot has rather different connotations from the nasty stuff Brits call bread, but I don't think there's a better word available, and a straight-up borrow would feel fairly weird in most context. Much weirder than borrowing 'sharding' in a technical context.

I'm absolutely puzzled by this. Not British but I've been to both countries and can't say I noticed much difference in their bread.

What do you consider to be the key distinction between German and British bread? Why do you think it is such a dramatic change that you can't countenance using the same word?

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hollerith01/18/2025

>What's almost impossible to translate are everyday words.

That is very silly: just because German bread is different from British bread doesn't make the word "Brot" almost impossible to translate.