How English seeps into Czech

Do you remember the effort to give English terms such as “session” Czech equivalents? It’s been over a year, but that initiative probably died in its first two weeks. I supported it, though of course I sometimes used English terms myself. Not long ago I even got a real dressing-down in the comments on one of my articles for using terms like “deployment descriptor,” “iterování” (iteration), and “persistence framework.”

Today I work at a company whose official language is English. That doesn’t, of course, mean I use it in everyday conversations with Czech colleagues. Anyway, I’ve come across some interesting ways mangled English is seeping into Czech. It’s quite normal for someone to say “klouzne bagu” (close a bug), ask me to use some “tůlu” (a tool), or tell me to “vypablišit webservisu” (publish a web service).

Come on, compared with that, “iterování přes result set,” or iterating over a result set, is quite a nice bit of wordplay. Which of these would you use?

1. “Necháš ten antovskéj tásk vykreatit warko, které se potom deployne na Tomcat.” Have the Ant task create a WAR, which then gets deployed to Tomcat. The Czech mangles the English words for task, create, WAR, and deploy.
2. “Necháš tou ant úlohu vytvořit war, který se potom nahraje na Tomcat.” Have the Ant task create a WAR, which then gets uploaded to Tomcat. This version is mostly Czech, keeping Ant, WAR, and Tomcat.
3. “Necháš mravenčí úkol vytvořit archív webové aplikace, který se potom rozmístí na kocoura.” Have the ant task create a web application archive and distribute it onto the tomcat.

All right, option three was just for fun. Seriously, I understand wanting to polish borrowed terms, for instance when translating technical literature, but I think you’ll agree that in practice nobody is very precious about it. I’m curious how technical English will continue to seep into Czech.

In a few years, will it be normal for an ordinary technical sentence to contain more borrowed English words and mangled versions of them than Czech equivalents? I hope not, though whenever someone uses “sezení” (a sitting) for “session,” I have to stop and think what they meant.

One last gem. Not long ago, someone in a discussion group asked how to translate SOAP in the context of web services. Of course, a translator stubbornly insisted on “mýdlo,” meaning soap, until someone explained that it was an acronym for Simply Object Access Protocol …