[Y_Y]

I love watching CCC every years though I rarely catch it live. Since we have a couple of days to wait for this year's talk, I'll ask. Does it bother anyone else that some talks are in German, or does it bother anyone else that they find themselves bothered that the talks are in German?

I love all languages great and small, natural and formal and so I'm conflicted on subjects like this. I find young German speakers to be generally both good at English and pragmatic about choice of language and I'm glad to see that they haven't ceded the ground entirely.

On the other hand you might consider a language as a network whose utility grows with number of nodes. Or you believe in the inevitability of Gresham's Law driving out good currency with bad. I have sympathy for this point, and in an emergency in a mixed nationality group would certainly shout "fire" in English first.

As an example I'll be interested to watch this one about data protection for age verification: https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2024/fahrplan/talk/S... but feel it would be a shame if the reach was limited by the choice of language. AFAIR they don't do multilingual restreams (automated or otherwise) like some other online events.

(Übrigens kann ich doch Deutsch, trotzdem mein Standpunkt bleibt.)

[lispm]

I live in Hamburg/Germany, where the CCC is hosted. It would feel strange to go to a German hacker congress in a German city and people would expect that everything is in English, first. It's organized by volunteers from various CCC groups from all over Germany and not by a commercial congress provider. The result may look like a "professional" congress, but that's the result by countless hours of volunteers enabling it. Generally there is much more to the congress, then the talks you can see online. It's a large gathering (> 14k participants with >2500k volunteer organizers) of people from all kinds of German grassroots hacker domains... with a lot of groups meeting there and presenting themselves. The Hamburg congress center, where it takes place, is not the largest location possible, but it currently seems to be the best mix of a congress center in the middle of a large German city with lots of rooms and space for all the groups.

Having CCC talks translated to and from English/... is fine, as it's actually done.

https://events.ccc.de/en/2024/11/26/call-for-interpreters-tr...

says:

> We interpret ALL talks in the three main halls and the two community stages live and in real-time. German talks are interpreted into English, and vice versa. Our work is transmitted live in the lecture halls, streamed to the Internet, and recordings are published on CCC sites and YouTube. We have another channel where we interpret into more languages, this is transmitted and published in the same way.

[phlo]

> AFAIR they don't do multilingual restreams (automated or otherwise) like some other online events.

They do. There's a team of interpreters at CCC who translate most talks between English and German, and to some other languages. As with most things CCC, it's all volunteer-driven and done on a best-effort basis, but it's there.

When interpretation is available, I prefer talks that are given in whichever language the presenter is most comfortable in. Presenting in front of a large audience is stressful enough as it is, so IMO it makes a ton of sense _not_ to worry about doing that in a second/third language, and delegating that part of the presentation to someone else instead.

[sourcepluck]

I think it's great. I've good passable German, not enough to really follow the details of a fast-paced, complicated talk, so I'm practically shut off from German media (at this level, anyway). But still, diversity is good, and the American-Anglification of all things cultural and linguistical is not necessarily a net positive.

As in, I'm aware there's good points to it, but it's not an entirely clear picture, and some alternative things existing is probably good. How many 12-year old Germans who dislike English for one reason or another found CCC and had major positive changes occur in their lives, ya know.

[HeckFeck]

Some thoughts are too complex for English. Three genders means they are always one step ahead of the French. Shunning Latin root words means you can be more efficient.

German persists for good reasons.

[mr_mitm]

Can you give an example of a thought that cannot be expressed in English? That sounds like quite the claim without anything backing it up. I speak fluent German for what it's worth.

[bratwurst3000]

the only i can think of is sentence with comatas. In german you can have as many „hauptsätze“ in one sentence as long they are separated by a comma. for example what thomas berndhard does is crazy. its one sentence per page. i think in german you can be more precise in one sentence. but that will be a hell of a sentence.

[dpassens]

Can't you just use a semicolon to do the same in English? And even if not, just because an idea is split over several sentences doesn't mean you can't communicate it. That's what paragraphs are for.

[mr_mitm]

You can, and probably should. Texts like Kant are borderline incomprehensible even to native Germans and seem to only serve the author's need for displaying their intelligence. The ideas they are conveying are not that complex. Relativistic quantum theory or string theory can be expressed in English (plus math, while it's not like math wouldn't be needed in German) just fine, so I really don't understand where these supposed limitations of English are.

[davrosthedalek]

For what it's worth, I only have an example for the other way around: Accuracy vs precision. It's "Genauigkeit". But there is a subtle difference in meaning in English that is lost in German without additional explanation.

[bratwurst3000]

you can translate many english „complicated“ words one to one in german because german has a anglo saxon in it. for example accuracy is akkurat precission is prezision hypocrite is hypokrit etc

german has a crazy big vocabulary but most words arent used and in generell the language is simplified in everyday use. for example everyone has angst but noone has bange anymore. btw good word for anxious in german.

i once also had the impression that many nuances are lost in translation but then i had to realize germans are not using all the words of the vocabulary.

[davrosthedalek]

We have akkurat, which is only an adjective, there is not really a Noun version. But in any case, we would not give it the same meaning shift as you have in English, at least how it's used in physics.

Learning German is hard in the beginning, because of the more challenging grammar and "Donaudampfschifffahrtskapitaensmuetzenfabrikantengattin" but then becomes easier, as there a lot less word plays and figures of speech. It's quite regular. English is easy to get into, but to master it, you have to know them all. And the random pronunciation, of course.

Ja, Bange is uncommon. Really only used in "Da wird mir Angst und Bange!". and "Bange machen". It is still amazing to me that "Giving up the ghost" is a figure of speech in both English and German.

[dpassens]

> Some thoughts are too complex for English.

English just adopts all the good German words. Every time I, a native German speaker, have struggled to express something in English it was either because my personal vocabulary was lacking or because of societal differences, never because English is somehow inferior.

[davrosthedalek]

And German has adopted all the good English words.

Like Handy (cell phone), Beamer (projector), and body bag (fanny bag).

Oh wait....

[dpassens]

I've never heard a fanny pack called a body bag in German. It's a Bauchtasche in my family.

[davrosthedalek]

Might have been a regional thing. But I think there was an ad on tv... Didn't live long, was too embarrassing :)

Of course Handy is Schwaebisch: Ai handy kai Schnurr?

[b3orn]

Bodybag is more like a messenger bag.

[karmakurtisaani]

This is satire?

[davrosthedalek]

As a native German speaker living in the US, I have mixed feelings:

- Talks in German feel slightly less, hmm, professional? Maybe it's the field I grow up in (physics). Like, ok, in your studies you speak German, but when you grow up and go to big-boy conferences, it's English. The Congress should be big-boy league.

- Also, realistically, many technical terms are English, so the a German talk might have to make hard choices. CPU, not "zentrale Recheneinheit"

- At the same time, I like that it lowers the barriers for entry. Speakers and visitors who are not fluent in English can participate.

- Personally, though, I prefer a good fluent German presentation from a cringy English one. As a German native speaker, typical German mistakes in English irritate me more than others, I think, so I found some talks given in English hard to follow. Pet peeve: Technology. I think that's a better Shibboleth than Flash-Thunder-Welcome.

- Realistically though, the congress is a worldwide phenomenon, and important, and as English is the current lingua franca (hah), I think they should encourage English presentations, or at least English slides. (Because they provide translated audio in the recordings!)

- Lastly, I can only encourage everyone to learn more languages, at a young age. I kick myself I didn't. But even in languages which are relatively close, like English and German (compared to, say, Japanese), I found that one language has concepts the other one doesn't, and that changes how you think about things. For example, English has accuracy and precision, with, at least in physics, different meanings. In German, it's both "Genauigkeit".

(Edited: Formatting)

[lispm]

> "Realistically though, the congress is a worldwide phenomenon"

Actually it is an open meeting of the German members of the CCC. What you see online is an important part of the congress, but it is only a part of the whole thing. Much more it is a gathering of activists. Thus its from the CCC for CCC. Guests are welcome. Since the talks maybe interesting to a larger audience they are streamed and translated in real-time.

Visit the congress in Hamburg and you are beamed to an alternate reality for four days and nights, meeting all kinds of interesting people in person. That experience is a bit more mind-blowing than seeing translated talks online. ;-) People from outside Germany are visiting the congress.

[aveao]

Coming to my first congress (36c3) was special in this regard: Congress was all about talks for me before, but I only went to 2 talks. Last year I went to none. This year I plan to go to none too.

Congress is a gathering ground for likeminded people from all sorts of interests. Talks can be watched at home (except for ones that are not recorded at the request of the talk-givers), but being in the room with likeminded people, talking with them, learning from them is IMO irreplaceable.

[davrosthedalek]

>> "Realistically though, the congress is a worldwide phenomenon" >People from outside Germany are visiting the congress.

My point exactly! International people want to take part, best in-person, and they are more able to take part if as much as possible is available in the common-denominator language. I applaud CCC for all the effort they put in to make it such an awesome and accessible event! Maybe they do this already: I'd ask all presenters to prepare slides in English, either as primary, or as a backup. So that the English stream could show the English slides. Hey, I'd even volunteer to help translate!

I may be too used to physics conferences. The German physics society (btw the largest physicists society in the world) has a yearly conference (well, multiple, split by topic), and they tend to be attended by many non-Germans. So many of the talks are in English, especially the main ones. But there are many many parallel session filled with short talks. Many of these are "my first talk at a conference" type of talks, and are in German. That's perfectly OK. That's part of the role of that conference: Every student submission is accepted. Some are good, most are not great, both from content (because you don't present world changing news in a short talk in a parallel session) and style (because giving good talks requires experience). That's all OK, and important. And it's important to lower the stress level by not also requiring English. Of course, as a "grown up", you go there to support your students, to chat and meet colleagues, and it's great for that. But I am also a lot at "higher level" conferences, with a more robust vetting of talks or even only invite only talks. The talk quality is much better. They are 100% in English. So in my brain, I connect "talk is in German" with "everybody can give a talk", and "my-first-talk-ever", but not with "guaranteed super high quality talks".

But CCC has to sort out many talks, AFAIU, so "everybody can give a talk" isn't true.

[diggan]

> The Congress should be big-boy league.

I'm not sure how many people actively involved with the community who agrees with this. It's a grassroots movement and I'm fairly sure many (most?) people want it to remain as such.

[sneak]

Just because people are good at English doesn't mean their English skills are up to giving a permanently-archived talk to tens of thousands of people at the 1st or 2nd most important hacker con on the planet.

I'm all for giving a presentation in the language you're best at. Let machine translation (or manual translation) pick up the slack, not one person's possibly-mediocre ESL skills.

I also can speak German but I avoid doing so when technical accuracy is paramount, because sometimes, small details really matter.

[hengheng]

I'm a native speaker and I hate how people have been stumbling through their presentations, lacking basic vocabulary, being dragged along by their bullet points. It wasn't even the accent, it was that the language occupied their minds so much that they couldn't think about what they had to say or how they were saying it. Lots of talks felt like watching a ninth grader in front of the classroom.

Now some of these guys weren't amazing presenters in German either, but my point is that they should not have to be. Some people simply are dry explainers and they don't naturally entertain. Nothing wrong with that at all, especially with such nerdy topics. But in those cases, I'd much prefer a lengthy blog article, or maybe a podcast interview with a capable host. Please, CCC, don't send these people on a stage that they don't enjoy when you could also work with them to get their stuff across.

And with how much is consumed as VOD, I don't think the live talk brings a lot to the table anymore. There could be live Q&A sessions for those who read article or heard the podcast interview.

(I'd argue the same for an academic context by the way - anything above seminar size is either a celebration or a sermon, but not a discussion.)

My best experience at CCC was to literally stumble over bunnie on the side of a hallway where he was sitting against the wall, introducing his own ARM laptop to a dozen of people or two.

And don't tell me this doesn't scale - he has also gotten his message across in ways that scale. But there was finally a natural way of asking questions in a back and forth manner that wasn't in front of a 500 people audience.

[davrosthedalek]

>Please, CCC, don't send these people on a stage that they don't enjoy when you could also work with them to get their stuff across.

Hmm, maybe this is actually a problem the community can address. For our conferences, people who are new to giving talks normally have a practice run or two at their universities with local people. Then they get feedback how to improve the talk. It doesn't work wonders, but it does help quite a bit. Not only does the feedback help improve the slides, the style of presentation, it also builds confidence.

Maybe CCC/somebody could organize optional "training sessions" where people can give test-runs. I'd volunteer to listen and give feedback. Or maybe a tutorial: "How to give a good congress talk"

[aveao]

These sessions would help few imo. It'd eat into people's congress time (few arrive before the event due to christmas), making it less appealing. Many also prepare their slides and talk last minute. Not a whole lot that can be done there.

[davrosthedalek]

Yeah, I meant this to be an online thing a week or two in advance. Doesn't help against last minute slides, but from my experience, the people doing presentations for the first time, don't prepare them so late.

[Sebb767]

> Please, CCC, don't send these people on a stage that they don't enjoy when you could also work with them to get their stuff across.

The speakers are not selected by the CCC; they have to apply with a synopsis of their talk.

[dingensundso]

And then some of the talks they are selected.

[sneak]

This is the conference equivalent of "this meeting could have been an email" - "this talk could have been a blog post".

Perhaps you could do us all the service of making a blog post for each of the CCC talks this year? :D

[pantalaimon]

Sounds like the job for a LLM

[jyounker]

It is a German conference. It was started by Germans. It is organized first and foremost by Germans. It happens in Germany.

I find it arrogant to think that presenters should speak a language other than German.

[Y_Y]

Have you been to a German university? Plenty of technical subjects will be taught in English even if the speaker and audience are German.

There surely us a kind of arrogance that demands Germans speak English, but I don't see anyone in this thread expressing that.

(I won't even begin to talk about the variety of dialects and identities contained within the modern German state, except to say that there is plenty of arrogance to be found there for those who seek it.)

[hooli_gan]

Yeah, but they do it to attract foreign students. Otherwise everything would be in German with english technical terms, where appropriate.

[Y_Y]

I don't think that's true

[Scarblac]

On the one hand, communication is easiest if everybody uses the same language. On the other, the dominance of English is one thing that gives US too much cultural power.

I think I'm happy that there is still content in other languages out there.

[usr1106]

Communication is not good if everybody speaks the same language at a different level. I have worked in English for close to 30 years and been at many international conferences, presented myself a couple of times. Still I feel handicapped in some presentations/discussions that are dominated by native speakers not using offshore English.

[davrosthedalek]

Hmm, not sure, I'm non-native English speaker as well. I have a lot more problems understanding/being understood by non-native English speakers from a different language background than I or they have with a native (American) English speaker. Or do you mean America with offshore?

[Y_Y]

What you say matches my experience. I grew up speaking "local" English, but now my day-to-day language is "international" English. I find it funny when people compliment me on my clear and simple English, because when I talk to my family it's anything but.

In my job I deal with tons of non-native speakers, and in some cases I'll end up "translating" between two speakers who can't understand each other, even though it's all nominally English. This is especially the case when they're from different parts of the world and accent and native language strongly influence their speech.

[usr1106]

Pronunciation is only one problem: Personally I find some British and most French natives harder to understand.

But native speakers from any continent can make me feel lost if they start to use a lot of idioms and slang expressions. My boss is an American who has lived abroad for a long time. I have usually no problems to understand what he means. In one phase I noticed him using an increasing amount of idioms I could not understand. When mentioning it to him he said he had had many telcos with US partners recently and that had probably inspired him to revive all kind of colorful idioms.

[usr1106]

Offshore English is a concept to make the language more understandable to non-native speakers. Avoid rare words and idioms. Avoid everything that wouldn't be taught in foreign schools or common in your field. You won't get a Nobel prize in literature using it, but international colleagues will thank you.

[miki123211]

> On the other, the dominance of English is one thing that gives US too much cultural power.

I think you got the causation wrong; the dominance of English is due to the US having cultural power, not the other way around.

If this were true, you'd see Ireland, Canada and Australia also having significant cultural power, and this just isn't the case.

[cjs_ac]

I think the dominance of English comes from the United Kingdom's significant cultural power in the nineteenth century (cf. French's status as the language of diplomacy deriving from France's cultural power in the eighteenth century). The US is just riding on Britain's (England's, really) cultural coattails.

(The US's economic dominance is, at present, unrivalled, however.)

[bratwurst3000]

i dont know anyone who speaks English because of that. all my friends and all people i met do it because US culture stuff like tv music articles. also here in europe its because of USA. Noone speaks british english here. With english we mean US english. also the other reason is work and travell and thats also mostly US english. if britain would speak chinese noone would speak chinese. everyone would speeak us English. Its crazy that people still have a britain centric worldview. that ship sailed 100 years ago and then it became the american century.

[rsynnott]

> Does it bother anyone else that some talks are in German, or does it bother anyone else that they find themselves bothered that the talks are in German?

There’s generally live translation (into English, German, and sometimes French). The translations are also available for download (eg https://media.ccc.de/c/37c3/).

[bleakenthusiasm]

They usually do Translation live, so I'd be very surprised if they didn't offer them in the stream as well. They always offer English and I think some talks have been live-transcribed, too, for people with hearing disabilities, but that might be automated by now.

Personally I think it's good you are not forced to present in English. I know enough people who are not comfortable enough with English to present in it. There are also some niche topics that have a focus on Germany. For these sometimes German brings a bit of nuance/local flair that you can't really translate. For these I'm happy that German is available as the original and then the translators will do their best to provide an English second best.

To some degree I find it inevitable that conferences situated in countries that are not native English speaking will have some program points in the local language. As long as they offer help with understanding the content, I don't see an issue with this, regardless of how big/influential they are.

[crest]

There is a realtime translation team that's available as an audio track in the life streams as. The translation is done be volunteers. The last ~5 years they managed to translate all the German and English slots on the official stages. Some less common language options may be provided later e.g. Spanish, French, Chinese, funni dialects like Plattdeutsch, etc.

[Y_Y]

Thanks for the info, I don't know how I wasn't aware.

May it serve as a warning, I put myself in mortal danger recently by referring to Plattdeutsch as a dialect (rather than a language). I have no skin in that game but some people feel strongly about it.

I'm general though I'd say that:

> a shprakh iz a dyalekt mit an armey un flot[0]

(Here I've rendered the Yiddish in Latin rather than Hebrew for emphasis.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...

[dewey]

When I was there where was always a group of people sitting in the first row live-translating the talks. That was many years ago so this is probably even better now.

[zxexz]

I've been to CCC (and hope to continue doing so again when life ceases to get in the way), and it's never bothered me in the slightest. The Congress is organized by the Chaos Computer Club, founded in Germany and consists primarily of decentralized clubs/associations that themselves are German-speaking. The talks (often) live-dubbed English, and post-talk the talks are translated as well (both the live translation and the post-recording subtitling are done by volunteers, BTW). The majority of congress-goers speak German as a first language, and frankly many of those who don't speak German still attend German talks - thanks to the translators (you can even get a sense of this by watching the talks on the website; there are many instances of English being used for questions and even answers in the Q&A sections of German talks). P ersonally, I believe the world would be less interesting if everything of interest was in the same language - I think all (major, at least - those with a budget for translators/enough volunteers to translate) conferences should allow the speakers to give their talks in the language they are comfortable in.

Anecdotally, I've never had passable German conversationally, but have studied the language a fair bit, and watching so many German talks with translation (both remotely and in-person) actually passively brought up my understanding of the language that I could understand most of what was being said; to the point that I felt comfortable over the years passively understanding the German language outside of the congress in most situations. Sure, being able to to speak in another language comfortably is ideal, but being able to listen, even just passively, in another language really feels like a superpower.

[ulnarkressty]

I have commented about this in the past and got downvoted for it. There is a reason why virtually all international conferences require presentations and talks to be held in English. If this was a German-only event it would be understandable, however as it is written on their website the CCC congress is "the biggest European hacker gathering and has grown into one of the most important conferences on digital transformation."

Another argument put forward is the existence of English dubs for every video. I have found the quality of these dubs varies a lot, since they are run by volunteers and not people experienced in live translation. In some talks there can be segments without any translation, and in one case the translator even "gave up" because the speaker was talking too fast.

[lispm]

> "the biggest European hacker gathering and has grown into one of the most important conferences on digital transformation."

"biggest European hacker gathering" -> still most participants are from Germany, that's where the Chaos Computer Club is located. The club itself is organized into local groups all over the country (plus some in neighbor countries).

[aveao]

It's a balance. Congress aims to be accessible ticket cost-wise to all.

Professional interpreters cost a lot of money, and as such it's done by volunteers. There's little to be done while maintaining the spirit of the event.

Nothing prevents people from redubbing talks either, which may honestly be a good community effort.

[namibj]

I just checked; they do in fact upload the live dub audio streams, see this talk from last year which was given in English but this is the German dub: https://media.ccc.de/v/37c3-12340-37c3_infrastructure_review...

[korfuri]

Hi, I'm a long standing CCC interpreter (volunteer of course).

We aim to interpret live 100% of the talks in German (* we do not always interpret things that aren't strictly speaking talks, like poetry readings or performance art, although we try to make these as accessible as we can). We also interpret various talks into other languages - we have a sizeable team working on French and Spanish interpretation, and depending on volunteer availability, we are keen to be target any spoken language. For this talk you are interested in, I'm very confident it will be interpreted into English.

You can find our work on media.ccc.de both on the streams and recorded talks. If you're attending live we have lower latency audio streams available on-site, check out c3lingo.org.

[miki123211]

Thank you, I didn't realize this existed.

I have accessibility needs (screen reader user) that make subtitles less fun to use than they would otherwise be, and I speak no German, so those interpreted recordings would be really great for me.

I assume you don't publish on Youtube? That's how I usually consume CCC content, mostly due to YT's recommendation algorithms and excellent cross-device "continue playback" support.

[crest]

The CCC is a big believer in self hosting there is a live streaming platform during the event and media.ccc.de afterwards.

[Y_Y]

My preferred YouTube client (NewPipe) even includes a CCC backend too.

[korfuri]

I'm glad we can be of service to you! There used to be a live captioning team writing subtitles but I think that effort stopped. I heard people were looking at AI-based captioning but I have not kept up with the plans for this year.

I know in previous years talks were published on YT, I assume this will still be the case this year. Normally the VOC team does miracles to publish incredibly quickly too, so you should be able to have the recorded talks online same-day.

[namibj]

Until very recently YouTube did not support multiple user-choice audio tracks on a video, so they would have needed to be uploaded separately.

Maybe it will change this year, though!

[bdhcuidbebe]

anton petrov channnel that i follow recently started offering multiple auto dubbed audio track, which confused me as it would auto select the german dub for me. i dont know german ;-)

[Y_Y]

That's great to hear and I think it's admirable work you are doing. Thanks for correcting my misconception and making this excellent content more accessible.

[anticensor]

Can you add Russian, Turkish and Romani languages too (they are the three largest minority languages in Germany)?