Am I the only one that gets confused on what the menus and other things on a non English computer or device actually mean when translated.
This coming from someone doesn't speak English as their first language.
I speak Romanian, Hungarian and English perfectly but my devices are always in English since it would be harder to figure out what they mean otherwise unless you have the structure memorized already.
You are definitely not alone in that. My native language is Arabic, but if I switch my phone or computer to Arabic I wouldn't be able to use it. I dread testing translations of apps I'm working on because it forces me to switch to Arabic. It doesn't help that there's a lot of jargon that just doesn't translate that well. For example, the translation of "Tap" to Arabic is the equivalent of either "Peck" or "Perforate". It's just that that's what's generally agreed on as the proper translation and everybody uses it, however, if I didn't know that it would take me a while to figure it out for myself.
All things being equal, I guess that's because you accept to pay the necessary price of learning English interfaces of your devices, but do not consider reasonable to pay any learning effort for other languages.
> but do not consider reasonable to pay any learning effort for other languages
One problem is that English is the language majority of technology is created in, and it has developed agreed-on terms for a lot of things. Everyone calls their tabs "tabs" in English, but when it comes to translating, every other app uses a different word. Even if names are consistent within the app, they are inconsistent between each other. This leads to a lot of problems if say, an app reports an error that's related to some OS thing, and calls it with a different translated name than the OS translation does.
EDIT: And I'm not making this up. I worked on a localized Ubuntu for a very short while before switching back to English because messages I got in my command line were painfully inconsistent with each other and with agreed-upon proper translations in my language.
This coming from someone doesn't speak English as their first language.
I speak Romanian, Hungarian and English perfectly but my devices are always in English since it would be harder to figure out what they mean otherwise unless you have the structure memorized already.