R & Dunglish
Thursday, April 22, 2010 at 02:41 PMEnglish is the language of software. Apart from unpronounceable punctuation (!.?), sexy curves ({}), or plain bad language (#$%&*), keywords in programming languages tend to be in English. System programming languages mostly are terse, with the flow of symbols interjected with short words like do, if and void. Languages designed for education or for "end user programming" are a bit more eloquent, and even dare to use more than one syllable: begin, procedure. You may have noticed that the ITP language does not shun big words, witnessing its latest neologism DATASTRUCTURE.
English is the language of Aia Software to the outside world, at least as far as the international market is concerned. Of course. If you want to sell your solutions and services around the globe, you'll talk in the language most potential customers understand.
The education system of The Netherlands is eager to give all Dutch a firm grasp of the English language, starting in the childhood. With the usual lack of effectiveness of this system, however, learning English starts after the age that children will learn a language naturally, from being exposed to it, but before they have a proper command of their native language. The effect is, predictably, that in the end they will not be fluent in English, nor be able to use their mother tongue flawlessly. College and university will worsen this situation by insisting to use English for half or all of the lessons. As the teachers are not native speakers either, in the end we're all learning each other some pidgin dialect of the English language. Anglophone readers may have been amused or annoyed in this respect by the documentation shipped with ITP or by this very blog entry itself. (Hey, we're doing our best!)
Talking about English-eagerness: today I saw a Dutch newspaper translate the German word “Müll” for their Dutch readers as “trash”. The translation is correct, but it would have been so much logical to translate it to the Dutch word “vuilnis”…
English is also the language of the R&D department of Aia, since a couple of months. When the development team was reinforced with a new member who was non-Dutch speaking, it was decided that the entire department would switch to English as the day-to-day language. The team was not only expected to talk English to the new member, but also when talking to other team members. The idea is that one can learn a lot from overheard conversations. As a side note I might add that many of us wear headphones playing music to be able not to involuntarily overhear every conversation. We have a lot of them, and team members share a single room, and sometimes it is just necessary to be able to concentrate on the task at hand.
The switch to English was triggered by the new team member's arrival, but not really caused by it, as the possibility to use English internally was already thought about before. Anyhow, the entire organization was informed about the rule of the new language, and funny language signs were posted on the doors to the R&D rooms. (# BEGIN language_code("ENG"), which is ITP-speak for Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate).
And we started speaking English. From 8 am. Up to 6 pm. Which appeared much harder than we thought, and especially much more tiring. A new member needs to be brought up to speed with a lot of technical knowledge. Sessions lasting an hour and a half, explaining nontrivial concepts and details in the architecture of ITP is tough already when done in Dutch. Speaking English is much different from writing it. You don't have the time to think for words or look them up, nor do you have time to ponder the correctness of your grammatical constructions. This is only partially compensated for by not having to look up the spelling of the words. Not only do you have to suffer from the awful accent of your colleagues, you also hear your own awful accent the entire day, which is much worse. On the other hand, you do actually learn from each other, because even through the accents you get to hear a lot of nice idiomatic expressions.
In time, our resolve to speak English continually began to erode. In a room where the new team member was not present, people would look cast around a quick suspicious glance before starting some small talk about the children, politics, or sports in Dutch. In some more time, small talk could even be Dutch with the new team member within earshot. Currently, sometimes even R&D topics get a Dutch treatment in presence of the new team member, if we are sure it would not interest her. We enter into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the tongue is weak.
Still I think speaking English in the department is a good idea apart from being able to communicate with all team members. I sincerely hope that it in time will help us raise the standard of language usage in our documentation. And of course, all R&D meetings still are held in English.
Our new team member thinks we hate her guts because we're forced to speak English because of her. Her study of the Dutch language is progressing rapidly. Perhaps these two statements are related.