Re:Show HN: Bato – A Filipino Programming Language
by nine_k on Friday January 12, 2018 @01:50PM
(#16135271)
Chinese is hard to transliterate to English, because there's no nice way to express the tone, and even with tones, there's a number of homophones. To express a precise meaning, you either use hanji, or proper English words.
Other languages, like Russian or Japanese, can be transliterated pretty unequivocally, so transliterated identifiers are often found in source code, especially in business-related identifiers where a precise translation may not even exist.
Variables in English, strings in Chinese when they have to (it manages a list of city names). I could work on that code and I don't know Chinese.
This is more or less what I see in code here in Italy. Sometimes somebody slips a variable name in Italian but among pro developers it's limited at cases when there is really no obvious English counterpart. Example: legal terms, they tend to be very specific and you'd need a lawyer to translate them correctly. Accounting too.