Lost in translation: hackathon?

Question

Machine translation from one language to another

I've been breaking my head for a long time: why is marathon ( marathon is a long-distance running event), but hackathon ( hackathon also known as a hack day, hackfest or codefest)? Hackathon?

Answer 1

Probably because the hack is more like a hacked phone :)

Answer 2

On Facebook's Native, speakers would pronounce it as hackafon. But in Russian there are a lot of words that were borrowed from other languages ​​and are not read quite like that. "Browser" and "Browser" for example. So it's better to write a hackathon.

Answer 3

On the one hand, it could be an adaptation for euphony or to get rid of parasitic connotations, as pointed out by eugenius_nsk .
On the other hand, in English itself, not everything is as obvious with pronunciations as it might seem.