I think it's actually detrimental. You will lose opportunities if you stick with any language but English for programming related things. Your translations won't be perfect. You won't be able to communicate with people in other countries. You will miss new important developments and discussion all of it happening in English. It's just much more efficient for everyone to swallow the pride and accept English as the language of programming/computer science.
I am not a native English speaker. I am not very talented when it comes to learning languages. It took me many years to be able to understand written and spoken English. Still I am very grateful that once I got there the whole world is open to me. I can read every important publication, participate in discussions and read code other people write. Doing it in my native language is just putting artificial barriers out there. It doesn't make sense. Learning about computer science in my native language just makes it less efficient and introduce problems like quality of the translation or terms lacking necessary context and usage patterns (as there is less published in that language).
I feel efforts to translate to other European languages will be detrimental to general level of education and communication in future businesses. Publish only in English, it forces people to learn it. It's better for everyone in the end. If you know you had to learn it to be a competent programmer or scientist or other IT specialist you will and by doing so you will contribute to removing barriers that exist in EU which Americans don't have to deal with. I believe it's one of the big advantages US IT sector has over Europeans.
Why?
Sure, it would be nice with more languages, but if someone from germany/france/spain want's to learn study AI, isn't it probable that they are used to reading english anyway?
You would think that, but I've seen Germans with a PhD that don't speak English. Once a language is large enough, most things get translated into that language (as there is a market for it). Anyway, German and French are large enough, Dutch isn't.
Seriously, I do not want to read German or French source code. Please write all your code and documentation in English.
And while you are at it, why not read the material in English in the first place? That way you are using the correct terminology.
My mother tongue is Dutch, and all my systems run in English. The silly words people come up with translating things to their own language is weird and confusing. I remember Excel having Dutch translations for their functions. WTF!?!?! Try to guess the Dutch version of things you already know.
You are working in the technology industry, learn English! (not directed at the above poster :))
do they only collaborate with people from their own university?
What about the tools that they use? do you get german translations for all those popular python-libraries?
How do you handle scientific papers? are those also translated, or do you only look at german research at german univiersities?
I would think that it would be pretty non-controversial to say that english is the lingua-franca of science today.
With that said, I could argue against myself in saying that it's nice of elementsofai to use as many languages as possible since this might be of use to people who are still far from university-level.
I've never encountered a single AI or CS paper translated to or written in German. You may not need to speak English for a PhD in, say, law, but you can't be a competent computer scientist only knowing German.
As someone that graduated during the 90's, and had graphics programming as one of my main focus, there were plenty of German only papers out of Darmstadt.
We had a couple of proceedings books with them on our university library.
People from other discipline may want to learn IA. Say for example someone majoring in linguistics that wants to do some NLP. And in this case, English proficiency may not be a requirement in his curriculum. Tons of researchers did and are doing their career in Europe without using much English.
I am not a native English speaker. I am not very talented when it comes to learning languages. It took me many years to be able to understand written and spoken English. Still I am very grateful that once I got there the whole world is open to me. I can read every important publication, participate in discussions and read code other people write. Doing it in my native language is just putting artificial barriers out there. It doesn't make sense. Learning about computer science in my native language just makes it less efficient and introduce problems like quality of the translation or terms lacking necessary context and usage patterns (as there is less published in that language).
I feel efforts to translate to other European languages will be detrimental to general level of education and communication in future businesses. Publish only in English, it forces people to learn it. It's better for everyone in the end. If you know you had to learn it to be a competent programmer or scientist or other IT specialist you will and by doing so you will contribute to removing barriers that exist in EU which Americans don't have to deal with. I believe it's one of the big advantages US IT sector has over Europeans.