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by KronisLV 779 days ago
I'm surprised that most of the comments seem to focus on other comparisons of EU and US, there's very little on those two points.

Personally, I think that English as the lingua franca makes sense in many contexts, since that's pretty much the case in IT already.

For example, trying to translate various terms in any given language from English usually causes inconvenience and confusion (everyone needs to know the localized version and then translate it back into English to find literature etc.). Therefore, it makes sense to teach everyone English.
2 comments
alephnerd 779 days ago
In CEE (excluding Germany and Austria) sure, but not as much in Western Europe (eg. France or Germany).

I've had an easy time managing Eastern European employees in English, but Western European ones sucked at the language, and always had a bit of a complex surrounding English.

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aleph_minus_one 779 days ago
> For example, trying to translate various terms in any given language from English usually causes inconvenience and confusion (everyone needs to know the localized version and then translate it back into English to find literature etc.). Therefore, it makes sense to teach everyone English.

Similarly, translating a lot of terms from German or Russian to English often causes inconvenience and confusion. So better learn German and Russian. :-)

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KronisLV 779 days ago
> Similarly, translating a lot of terms from German or Russian to English often causes inconvenience and confusion. So better learn German and Russian. :-)

If the programming language key words that I needed to know used those languages, as did all of the documentation and forums, conference videos and literature, that's exactly what I'd do. But somehow those aren't the languages that everyone uses, nor is something like Chinese (and its dialects) which has a lot of users, but isn't as geographically widespread. Maybe people have also settled on English because it has a somewhat low barrier to entry as well.

I guess it's the same as needing to know at least some latin in the natural sciences, because otherwise something like naming bones when talking to a foreign colleague would get awkward, fast.

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