# Multiple dispatch translation to e.g. German; Multimethoden? Multimethods \[NOT\] a synonym?

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/multiple-dispatch-translation-to-e-g-german-multimethoden-multimethods-not-a-synonym/133196>\
**Category:** Offtopic\
**Created:** [October 16, 2025, 7:45am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/multiple-dispatch-translation-to-e-g-german-multimethoden-multimethods-not-a-synonym/133196 "2025-10-16T07:45:04Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 3

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**Author:** ![foobar\_lv2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ee59a6/32.png) [@foobar\_lv2](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/foobar_lv2)\
**Post date:** [October 18, 2025, 7:55am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/multiple-dispatch-translation-to-e-g-german-multimethoden-multimethods-not-a-synonym/133196/41 "2025-10-18T07:55:50Z")

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> [@jlapeyre](#):
>
> I don’t see the advantage of non-authors and non-“experts” (such as myself) re-litigating the terms to suit our fancy.

That is quite correct, we can gripe about suboptimal terms, but that ship has mostly sailed.

But it appears like there today are no widely accepted technical terms in German (evidence: The crowd of native speakers on this forum).

This puts the translator in a pickle: They need to coin a technical term, or directly take the untranslated technical term (which is a choice in itself).

At no point you should ever take the English term-of-art, forget its term-of-art-ness and translate it as a sequence of English words, that way you end up with “multiple dispatch” → “Mehrfachversand” → “redundant shipping”. I would say that you should almost entirely disregard the individual words in the original term-of-art.

One needs to go through the same process as when naming a novel thing, i.e. look at the underlying concept / definition, think about how to disambiguate from adjacent concepts, think about what connotations one wants to evoke, consider adjacent terms-of-art, and decide whether to emphasize term-of-art-ness (“Bobrow dispatch”) or try to use words that allow readers to get a rough understanding without looking up a definition (incurring the risk that some readers might miss the fact that this is a term of art).

The question of how explicit one wants to be that this is a term of art also turns up in stupid details, like “multiple dispatch” (clearly untranslated term-of-art) vs “multipler Dispatch” (…kinda Germanized, not unambiguously a term of art, as opposed to a collection of words, but rolls easier off the tongue because you don’t need to switch pronounciation mid-sentence).

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**Author:** ![Sevi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c67d28/32.png) [@Sevi](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Sevi)\
**Post date:** [October 18, 2025, 9:48am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/multiple-dispatch-translation-to-e-g-german-multimethoden-multimethods-not-a-synonym/133196/42 "2025-10-18T09:48:42Z")

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> [@foobar\_lv2](#):
>
> But it appears like there today are no widely accepted technical terms in German (evidence: The crowd of native speakers on this forum).
> 
> This puts the translator in a pickle: They need to coin a technical term, or directly take the untranslated technical term (which is a choice in itself).

But there _is_ a translation and whether or not it is widely accepted is hard to decide from the small sample size of people in this thread.

The premise of this thread is that the translation on Wikipedia (“Multimethoden”) might be wrong, but I don’t see any evidence for that. All I could find after a (granted, very brief) search in German sources suggests that “Multimethoden” exactly refers to the thing that people would call “dynamic multiple dispatch” in this forum. The concept predates Julia of course, so even if we in the German Julia community would come up with our own “better” translation, it would not automatically make it a more or less accepted translation for German programmers overall. E.g. there is this article from a C++ community [Multimethoden | C++ Community](https://www.c-plusplus.net/forum/topic/159235/multimethoden/2)

One of the books mentioned in that article’s sources has a whole chapter dedicated to “Multimethods” which has been translated to German as “Multimethoden” ([https://de.book-info.com/isbn/3-8266-1347-3.htm](https://de.book-info.com/isbn/3-8266-1347-3.htm)). Not everyone might think the book was well translated overall (judging by Amazon reviews at least), but “Multimethods → Multimethoden” is pretty sensible to me and since the book is a standard book on C++ design and has been out for more than 20 years it does provide strong evidence for the use of that term in a larger community.

So my point is, we are not at the stage of coining a term, we are already at “griping about suboptimal terms”, also for the German translation.

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**Author:** ![Eben60](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/eben60/32/13475_2.png) [@Eben60](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Eben60)\
**Post date:** [October 18, 2025, 1:53pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/multiple-dispatch-translation-to-e-g-german-multimethoden-multimethods-not-a-synonym/133196/43 "2025-10-18T13:53:50Z")

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> [@Sevi](#):
>
> we are not at the stage of coining a term

We are not. There is an article on _multiple dispatch_ on Wikipedia in 10 languages, of which 7 are Romance, Germanic, or Slavic, which I can either read or roughly guess the meaning. All tell us _multiple dispatch_ and _multimethods_ are more or less interchangeable. Romance languages translate _multiple dispatch_ into _Dispatch múltiple_ / _Le dispatch multiple_ / _Despacho múltiplo_. Russian and Ukrainian use kind of russified form of _dispatch_ together with Slavic translation for _multiple_. Thus all of them use basically the word _dispatch_, (presumably) pre-existing in the respective languages.

In German however, the word _Dis­pat­ch_ on itself doesn’t exist. Translations, like _Laufzeitüberladungsauflösung_ might be exact (and preciser than the original), but sound awkward. The English term _multiple Dispatch_, or slighty germanized _Multipler Dispatch_ however sounds perfectly well in German, and is being used in this form.

Now concerning _multiple dispatch_ vs. _multimethods_ (in whatever human language). Even though we are told they can be used interchangeably, the choice of Julia creators was _multiple dispatch_ or _dynamic multiple dispatch_, thus in German that could become _multiple(r) Dispatch_ or _dynamischer multipler Dispatch_.

P.S. Bikeshedding as it’s best 😁

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