Translating for communicating is fascinating and frustrating. People have been trying to solve this problem forever. The historical significance of the Rosetta Stone is a good example of the impact good translations can have for getting things done.
Working thoughts on documentation:
Winners write the history books
Lacking translations can introduce process friction or can be used strategically for competition
Giving up the language you know to switch to another language is a people problem, which makes it one of the hardest to solve.
XKCD has a quality take on this issue:
I recently had this experience with map making. NYC Open Data has data for bicycle lanes in several file formats. Google has a tool for creating maps and importing existing files. Here is the Venn diagram of file extensions available, and supported file extensions:
Needless to say, smh