I'm spanish and loathe spanish-written code. It looks so unprofessional to the eye. Luckily in all spanish companies I've worked on they had an english-only policy for the code and comments. This was because the companies didn't discard that foregin devs could join at some point in the future and friction should not come from a lack of Spanish skills when reading /writing code. It made however for some funny comments from people who didn't really know their way to prose writing in English.
At my company we're finally trying to write code in English (much to the despair of way more developers than I would have expected), but one serious difficulty we've encountered (appart from people that don't know how to write correct sentences...) is translating domain-specific terms. Either it seems like bad translation, or it's not understandable at all.
I don't know what the solution should be in that case? Keep domain-specific terms in French?
I've also ran in to the reverse problem: mixing English and Dutch in confusing ways. For example, a common naming pattern in is `GetFooByID()`, `GetFooByName()`, etc. I think it makes sense to stick to that, but if `Foo` is a non-English word it just gets confusing/inconsistent, especially because in some cases you would translate Foo and other cases you don't.
On the other hand, translating domain-specific terms can also be very confusing. For example at my previous position we built a rental contract system that was very specific to the Dutch rental system/laws. We translated everything to English, but a lot of stuff is just funky because it's a specific Dutch term without a real English translation (for example names of specific laws/procedures).
My advice is to give up, destroy your code base, and become a sheep herder. You're screwed no matter what.
I'd say if it's a country-specific thing with domain terms that one would need to learn and know anyway to do the work, even if the programmer was foreigner... then keep those terms without translation. It will be less confusing.
Using national language in code bases is indeed bad, if you want tomhave them sold to foreign companies or contributed to by the international community.
On the other hand, it may be good if you want to avoid this. I guess, not a lot of the sources developped in China is hacked on by non-chinese, or easily spied on by foreign powers...
