Comment by flohofwoe
6 years ago
When the audience is programmers or generally tech people, not translating from English might indeed be the best option. The lingua franca of technology is English.
E.g. looking at the quality of Microsoft's German translations (which seem to be done by a poorly trained bot), the translation is actually counterproductive, because it's full of special terms translated into German that either would not be translated from English in a "native" German text, or where a different translation is commonly used.
My favourite is the Visual Studio translation for Link-Time Code-Generation. Which is translated as "Link-Zeitcode Generierung" which in English means "Link Timecode Generation".
It is a tough one and yes, here in Germany I would expect far most developers to understand enough English to use English tools and documentation. (Exceptions exist, notably with old technology like Mainframes)
In other countries like Russia or Japan I noticed, as an outside observer, more reliance on translations.
When translating a complication is the degree to which one does it. There are terms which can be translated and some where it becomes weird. In some parallel comment "pull request" was mentioned. Translating that certainly becomes weird, but translating "file" as "Datei" is well established and - when translating - expected.
Even not great translation helps younger wanna be programmers. They have better chance to learn. It takes quite a lot of time to learn English well enough to understand documentation.