English Is OK (for Polish natives)
A post deliberately peppered with numerous anglicisms.
Once, a guy at work responded to my request to “share the screen” with a sulky “I don’t understand.” I asked what the problem was, because judging by his tone of voice I suspected that—contrary to what he had just said—it certainly wasn’t a lack of understanding of what I meant.
“In Polish you say udostępnij ekran (‘share the screen’)” — he snapped back, clearly looking for something to nitpick about, so he decided to bang the patriotic-linguistic drum.
“Oh great,” I thought to myself, “a language purist.” I didn’t want to cause any trouble, so I went along with the “screen sharing,” without informing the guy that the Polish word ekran is itself a classic borrowing from the French word écran…
Anyway, part of my job is being able to communicate with whoever I need to communicate with in professional matters. My ego didn’t suffer, and the thread of linguistic understanding between us remained intact.
A Common Language
So let’s face facts. In the IT industry, English is the lingua franca. Let me list a few reasons for that:
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The reasons are both historical and contextual. Computer science (and telecommunications) developed in two English-speaking countries: the United Kingdom and the United States, closely tied to both the military industry and academia. With the awareness that this is a big simplification, I mean the development of hardware, software, and networking technologies alike.
Many studies have been written on this subject, and I personally enjoy returning to the winding stories of the field’s pioneers and the evolution of computer technology. In the context of this post, I only want to point out that this fascinating and inspiring history of the triumph of human engineering thought was born in English, which largely determined the “native language” of the entire discipline—including its commercial branch.
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Documentation and specifications of all kinds—standards, frameworks, APIs, RFCs, etc.—are written in English. This can be seen as a direct consequence of the previous point.
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The keywords of most programming languages are in English (and here I apologize to programmers of Serbian Ћ плус плус or the Polish language Zdzich).
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It is considered good practice to name variables in English and to write code comments in English so that they remain readable to other members of international teams. Unless, of course, you’re a PKP programmer.
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English is the language of global corporate communication and even has its own jargon. Following corporations, local small and medium-sized companies that aspire to be “corporate” also adopt it.
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And you can communicate with support teams in India in English 🙂
It’s Not a Bug, It’s a Feature
Besides that, Polish equivalents of English technical terms often sound… somehow worse. Maybe that’s because I’m only occasionally exposed to programming jargon in Polish, but some expressions simply sound odd to me in my native language.
For example, data types in specifications are usually given in English (often as abbreviations like bool, int, float), and people who didn’t study at a Polish technical university might not even know that tuple is called krotka in Polish.
Idempotence? Idempotency? What is it even called in our language?
I also had to think for a moment about how to translate deployment. It seems that wdrożenie (“implementation”) would be the closest equivalent, but doesn’t that refer more to implementation in general? You can implement CRM or ERP systems, but people say “we’ll deploy the code to prod,” not “we’ll implement the code into production.” Simply put—linguistic irony—no one actually says that in Polish.
“Cloud” has been translated as chmura, but everyone still talks about solutions in the “cloud.”
I’m not even sure how to translate pipeline.
Hosting is hosting.
Renderowanie (“rendering”) is simply the English word with a Polish suffix added—a classic borrowing.
Batch could technically be translated as wsad (similar to batch files → pliki wsadowe), but it sounds terrible.
In the famous phrase “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature” you could translate bug as “error,” but you would lose its excellent historical context.
Creole Cuisine
Trying to translate acronyms that originate from English expressions is basically doomed to fail. A few examples: CI/CD, JSON, FTP, SQL, TCP/IP, HTTP(S), AI, CPU, VPN, XML, API, RAM, CSV, curl, and so on.
What’s more, most of them are inflected in Polish (for example: “do you prefer JSON-s or CSV-s?”), and I’ll return to that point shortly.
English and Polish mix together, and no one should really be breaking lances in defense of the purity and virtue of the Polish language because of it. Even the example from the beginning of this post—“sharing the screen”—is a perfect illustration of how Polish still holds its ground in the industry, because it transfers its grammatical inflection onto the English phrase.
“Jump in asap to the team daily and share the screen with the backlog” is a perfectly understandable and precise message. In a way, it’s a kind of industry-specific creole language.
Of course, the equivalent sentence—“join the team’s daily meeting as soon as possible and share the screen with our backlog of tasks”—would also be understandable to a Polish native speaker and perhaps more “properly Polish.” But work is not a Polish-language olympiad, so in my opinion that’s a bit of overkill 🙂
The bottom line of this post—and my opinion—is that as long as Polish grammatical inflection affects English borrowings (including acronyms), linguistic ultra-purists can safely lower their guard and sleep peacefully.
Language evolves, interacts with other languages, and borrowings exist in every language. English is full of words with French origins, but it also includes borrowings from Polish.
If you scratch the patina off words and consult etymological dictionaries, it turns out that hardly any of them are truly native to a given language. All right, time to end this off-topic digression.
Sometimes English Sucks
Of course, English is sometimes overused or serves as a low-quality attempt to mask someone’s obscurantism. It can also be used thoughtlessly.
For instance, using the word collaboration in Polish to mean cooperation makes me cringe (“fruitful collaboration” — an Austrian painter would approve), as does pointing out “dependencies” in Polish-speaking teams instead of simply saying zależności.
But I’ll admit, somewhat subjectively, that I’ve only heard such linguistic gems from various Agile-oriented slackers in the organizations I’ve worked in. Incidentally, I wrote a bit about their tendency to distort words that already have well-established meanings in other fields here.
Last but Not Least
Why am I writing about this?
Because I need it for the next post, which will also deal with the linguistic worldview of the Polish IT industry (and beyond). I hope I’ll be able to link to it here soon.
PS. I’ve written it :)