A couple of months ago I moved to Germany. Taking some projects on my own, I've recently had the opportunity to develop with a company-based framework, that was very well documented, but in German. My German is pretty good, however my programming terminology is somewhat lacking.
Long story short, I was wondering, how common is it to document code in a language other than English?
Sorry to seem English-centeric but it seems like a bad habit.
Best Answer
Personally, I tend to write all variable/function/class names, comments and documentation in English. And no, it's not my native language (Dutch is).
There are several reasons for this:
For non-programming related documentation (e.g. user docs) it really depends on the intended audience. There are definitely cases where providing documentation in non-English languages makes sense, but I think there are very few cases where not providing English documentation makes sense1. Yes, this means you may have to provide the same documentation translated into multiple languages.
1 Even if the product being documented is tightly bound to a geographical region where English is not one of the primary languages, that doesn't necessarily excuse a lack of English docs. For example, tax software for the Dutch market at first look wouldn't seem to need non-Dutch documentation. Until you consider foreigners living and working here, perhaps needing all the help they can get to figure out an unfamiliar tax system. And (western) foreigners living here are much more likely to know English than any other non-Dutch language -- though in this particular example Arabic and Turkish docs might be useful too due to relatively large immigrant communities from those regions.