In today’s world, people use millions of computers and other electronic devices every day. All of them operate on the base of various software written in different programming languages.

Despite the language barriers, developers all over the world are able to join their efforts to create new products and keep the world moving. If you want to get the answers on questions: why are programming languages in English, and how programming language translator software works, just keep reading.

Why major programming languages are written in English?

There are many different programming languages, which currently exists in the world. They were developed in different countries across the globe: from Australia to Russia, from France to China. So, it’s pretty hard to understand why are programming languages in English. There are four reasons, which explain this phenomenon:

English is a bridge language. In fact, English is always used in international trade and cross-cultural communication. It helps specialists from different fields, including information technologies, communicate within multicultural teams and share the experience.

The USA was the primary market for computers. It’s not a secret that the USA was a pioneer in computer production. Also, it was the first country, which started to sell personal computers to the population. For this reason, programmers were forced to write new languages in English to meet the needs of the target market.

Compatibility with the six-bit character code. In contrast to other languages, English is made of the Roman character set, which is comfortable to use. Such languages as Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and Hindi are simply incompatible with six-bit character coding. So, developers found it easier to use English, even though they were not native speakers.

Compatibility with ASCII is a must. This is one more reason, which makes it easy to understand why are programming languages in English. Computers and other gadgets utilized codes of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange to represent text. ASCII used to be a major character encoding which worked on all devices without any additional software.

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Do any non-English-based programming languages exist?

There is no room for a doubt that the English language runs the IT world. But there is a question: are all programming languages in English? The answer is NO.

There are a lot of non-English-based programming languages, but all of them are used locally: only in one single country, or one region. Drama is pretty popular in the Netherlands, Kumir – is in Russia, Linotte – in France, Nadeshiko – in Japan, Ssiat – in Korea.

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What is a language translator?

Language translator is a program which allows transforming codes into machine language. In other words, it helps to translate and interpret instructions, which are written in the standard source code to object code (from one specific programming language into another).

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How does it work?

There are three types of programming language translator software: compilers, interpreters, and assemblers. They work differently, but the result is pretty much the same.

Compilers. This type of software interprets the complete source program from a high level language into the machine language.

Interpreters. This kind of the programs performs computer code language translation in another way. It executes one instruction at a time. It is suitable for high level languages only.

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Assemblers. This is a computer program, which translates an assembly (a low level) language program into its machine language equivalent. It works in the way compiler does, and the only difference is levels of languages (high and low).

To sum this up, not all programming languages are in English, but only those, which are used globally. As for computer code language translation, it is performed by compliers, interprets or assemblers, depending on the high or low language level.