While i appreciate that they're trying to do good, for people interested in communicating with people from other cultures translated technological terms have al

While i appreciate that they're trying to do good, for people interested in communicating with people from other cultures translated technological terms have always been a massive bane. I live in germany and while germans generally have little patriotism they're fierce defenders of their language, which led to all sorts of domain-specific terms being translated across many different kinds of media. Be it movies, books, technical manuals, programming instructions. And for all of them it's a common theme that someone who believes they know a thing, might even consider themselves an expert, they have trouble then branching out of their linguistic bubble. When talking to experts in their domain, from another language, they suddenly cannot communicate anymore, even if they speak the other language fluently, as they need to learn an entirely new vocabulary just for basic interaction. And this is not just a theoretical situation. I've had problems when talking about books i read in my youth, because often important words or even names had been changed and the person i was talking with knew the same characters, concepts or ideas i knew but neither of us knew under what names the other knew them. I learned Perl on the internet, on my own, using exclusively the english source documents; when talking to german Perl programmers i've repeatedly had issues because they had learned it in german courses which used german CS terms. Instead of actually discussing business we spent half the time sorting out what to call a thing. I also translated MMO content professionally for a while. While our translations were great and allowed the germans a perfectly fluid native experience, we found that many germans tended to switch the game to english after a while, because they couldn't talk to other players since the item names, skill names and location names were all different. There are some situations where it's fine to use a translated term. Example: Mouse. In german the word is written Maus and pronounced identically. In such a situation where the difference is minimal, a translatio can be fine. However in all other situation i believe translation of domain-specific words does damage in the long term.