An old Japanese programmer told me that when he started out, they attempted to translate everything into Japanese. My memory is fuzzy (this conversation was 8 years ago) so take this as more of an example then exactly what he said. For example, "string" was translated by its rope-like meaning, you used that kanji to write it in comments/docs, and when talking to other programmers you'd use the Japanese word. Anyway they gave up on that for the most part.