[skytin1004]

Context: I maintain multilingual automation workflows across several Microsoft OSS repositories and started reaching out to DevTool maintainers to understand how they approach documentation localization.

These were some patterns that came up repeatedly.

[gus_massa]

Hi from Argentina! We use a lot of loaned words while programming and related stuff. I usually prefer to read the English version, because in the Spanish version I have to untranslate. It's more common in es-es localized docs, they like to translate every single word.

A translated version may be useful for first year students, but somewhere in the middle of the degree every book is in English, the variables must be named in English, the API must use English names, and when you talk you use 95%Spanish+5%English.

The only exception I make is for some real world objects. I work in the first year of the University of Buenos Aires. I made a custom program that must handle the 10 "sedes" where the classrooms are. How do I translate "sede"? It's usually a "building", but sometimes a "sede" has two "buildings", or half a "building". Do I call them "campus", we used to have to "sedes" that were nearby "buildings" inside the same big park that everyone would call "campus". Now each "sede" is like 5 miles away form the nearest one, so they are pretty discrete. So I made an exception and the variable names in the code say "sede".