Comment by capableweb
6 years ago
I think it very much depends on the the country.
In Sweden, you can assume that pretty much everyone understands English, so if your website has an incomplete Swedish translation, might just be better to go with English one anyways.
But in Spain (outside the big cities), not that many people do understand English. In that case, it'll be better to serve a incomplete Spanish version instead of in English, as otherwise they'll be completely lost.
So as always, I'd say it really depends, and it's hard to generalize over all "international users".
I think the important question is about the target audience of this site: how many of each language's programmers know no English?
I'm a native English speaker, so I don't know.
French here. I know lots of developers who don't speak English well. They know specific words that are used in language constructs (while, function, class) or usual software vocabulary (provider, database) but they lack the rest: the grammar, non technical vocabulary, everything.
They maybe do not speak a perfect English but know it enough to read docs, blogs etc.
France has an obsession about its language (which is wonderful) and believes that the whole world should adapt (which is dumb in tech). You should attend some union meetings where all docs are expected to be in French "because that's the law". The reality of the world is not a concern of theirs.
Source: I am French, work in tech and see how much this illusion of "everything in French" hurts us. If you do not speak English then either learn, or work outside dev.
Exactly, this is true in many places in Spain and latin-america as well.
You wouldn't be able to have a software design session in English, but they would understand specific English words and even use them when speaking Spanish generally.