Translated CS Terms Feel Different

CS concepts have familiar names

I’ve recently been reading The Dream Machine, a book about the early history of interactive computing. Somewhere it mentions how the name mouse for the popular pointing device came into being. We call this thing mouse simply because the folks (Engelbart et al.) behind it used that name. It was more like a joke or nickname sort of thing. They probably didn’t really plan to make it an official name. However, the name just stuck.

Such naming was pragmatic and spontaneous. It was more like an Internet meme than a carefully-planned creation. Probably because of this, it’s repurposing an existing name everybody is already familiar with.

I realise that the names of many other concepts in computing are simply repurposed everyday names. Once I showed a CS paper I had written to a friend, who didn’t have a CS background and was unfamiliar with many of the concepts in the paper. Despite this, she told me she found the words familiar and could roughly guess their meanings in many cases. Just to name a few examples: memory, packet, cache, register, transaction, stack, heap, server, client, master, slave, bus, routing, switch, file, folder, tree, queue, list, terminal, thread… I don’t know how exactly each of those names was born, but my guess is that they were similarly improvised so people at least had a way to talk about a newborn concept.

Their Chinese translations are less familiar

Then I think of those same concepts in Chinese. My undergrad education was in Chinese. Although back then I also regularly read English-language textbooks and articles, it was through their Chinese names that I first learned about almost all of those concepts. I also used Chinese names in most conversations and writings.

My overall feeling about those Chinese names is that they are more unfamiliar and distant from everyday life. Some of them can even be a bit intimidating. For example, the Chinese translation of stack is 栈, a word that does have the sense of a pile of things, but is quite obsolete and almost never used in modern Chinese. In comparison, in modern English stack is an everyday word, e.g., a stack of books. Another example is routing, which in Chinese is 路由, which again is common in English, e.g., rerouting a train. The term bus also has a bizarre translation, 总线 (general cable), again an esoteric new word.

Some other translations are less intimidating but still feel less familiar than their English originals. For example, one thing that such translations often do is to suffix the name with 器 or 机 (machine), as if just to remind us that we are talking about some sort of devices: 计算器 (calculating machine) for calculator, 计算机 (computing machine) for computer, 寄存器 (registering machine) for register, 交换机 (switching machine) for switch, 服务器 (serving machine) for server. There is also 鼠标 (mouse cursor) which is a newly coined word formed by adding the functionality (cursor) of a mouse to its original English name. Others are more direct translations and are also everyday words. Examples include 文件 (file), 文件夹 (folder), 树 (tree), 队列 (queue).

This might be different for different people, but to me, the less familiar translations make the concepts appear a little more distant and esoteric. Such a difference might appear tiny on the surface, but I believe we easily underestimate its importance. Before I delve into something, the first thing I know about it is its name, which affects my presumptions about how difficult the concept is. I sometimes find myself susceptible to such presumptions. As a result, there is greater resistance learning them in Chinese, and I find building my English vocabulary has unexpectedly helped me enhance my understanding of those concepts retrospectively. I was initially confused by 路由, for example, but when I became familiar with the English word route later, I began to understand better that it was about getting from A to B. On the other hand, since many of the Chinese translations are specially coined words not seen elsewhere, it can be less ambiguous than the originals when the context is not clear. For example, in Chinese we never confuse serving machines with waiters.

How come?

The apparent stylistic difference between the translation and the original might be due to the different circumstances and people involved in creating them. Unlike naming a new thing for the first time, translating an existing name into another language probably has less sense of urgency. The translators are likely to already be part of an expert community familiar with the concept, who are already using English names for communication. They can therefore spend more time finding a name that characterises the concept well. Since there’s already an “inner circle” around it, there’s also less need to use a familiar word.

Those are just my own guesses. The full story could involve many more factors. Whatever the causes, I am reminded of how easily language can influence the way we think and learn. In particular, far from being opaque labels, names carry meanings and can affect one’s initial judgement of things. Even some apparently unimportant decisions in word choice can affect the overall effectiveness in achieving a communication goal.