The Ugly American Programmer

I’m a portuguese speaking student, most my professors recommend using the english books instead of the ones translated into our language. The terms like recursion, instruction, busy waiting, scheduling, etc most of the times don’t translate right. Some translated books don’t even translate such terms, those books work as good for me than the english ones, but the other books are almost always crap.

For example, the operating system book I use translate scheduling into escalonamento when the right word should be agendamento. escalonamento means a completely different thing in English.

As for commenting code in english, I do that too and it almost cost me a 0 on one of my code projects. My professor assumed that I copied/pasted the work from the internet since I commented everything in english. I still do it though, comments in portuguese suffer from the same problem as translated books.