Programming in Other Languages

As a native English speaker I’ve had a distinct advantage in learning how to program. I know I’ve taken this for granted numerous times, and I’m willing to bet other natively English-speaking developers have too.

Every once in a while though I find myself working on a project in other languages. Much like trying to navigate in a foreign city where you don’t read or speak the language or fully understand the street signs, it can be a little disorienting and humbling. I always emerge with a greater appreciation for multilingual people.

Some memorable occasions where code and language collided for me:

• Earlier in my freelance career I was asked to debug some ActionScript for a Flash-based project (I’ve been around a while). I was not overly familiar with ActionScript, but to make matters more challenging the project owner had hired a firm in Brazil to do the original build. The site was well documented, but it was all in Portuguese, which I do not speak. I remember I had Google Translate open in another tab to copy & paste the comments into as I tried to parse what parts were doing what.

• I had a very basic request for a long-standing client to help them change DNS records for their new host and email service we’d setup. When the time came I learned the owner of the various sites we’d been working on was based in Germany, and though they had registered the site at 1and1, which I was familiar with, I had to use their German language portal to access the DNS records. I’m not a fan of 1and1’s services in general, but navigating their crappy portal in a language I don’t speak was an extra layer of frustration, though thankfully I also saw a bit of humor in the whole situation.

• I was asked to provide a Chinese translation for an event registration website. The language was provided in an email, which I simply had to copy and paste into the correct place. This went fine, but it definitely drove home the face I had no idea what was on the page, that I knew nothing about how to format the text or change the font, if that request had come in. Also, though not really part of my job, I like to proofread the things clients provide, even if its only a quick glance. In this instance I could’ve been pasting complete gibberish for all I knew.

• I promised to take a look at my relatives’ website for their men’s clothing business an give a few thoughts and pointers, particularly about getting e-commerce up and running so they could actually sell things online. This business is based out of a small-is town outside of Belgrade, Serbia. Despite my efforts, I do not speak passable Serbo-Croatian (Moj srpski je sranje, brate), and people really do not buy things online much at all over there as it turns out, though that’s starting to change. The feedback I realized I could give turned out to be surprisingly limited. Even giving rudimentary SEO advice when you don’t speak the language is a funny thing — “So, on this page where you’re selling shirts, let’s be sure to have shirt in the title and your main navigation… so, which word is shirt again?”

Published on Tuesday, January 30th 2018. Read this post in Markdown or plain-text.