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One annoying issue with translated apps the author doesn't cover is "googlability", the fact that we often need to google an error message or menu label in order to solve a problem. This leads to a lot of bilingual people running their software in English just in case they need to paste an error message into a search engine.

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Totally agrees. FireFox devtools UI language is your browser language, and the error messages are also translated. A really annoying thing is there doesn't seem to have an easy way to only switch devtool language to English.

On the other way, Chromium devtools doesn't even have translations so it doesn't have this problem. And the new Edge (Chromium) translates the devtool by default, but there is an option allowing you to switch back to English in devtool only.

Yes. Having unique error codes should be a best practice with translated apps.

I've always felt that a popup with an error code should have a "search the web for this code" button.

That’s where “error code” essentially comes from, an actual code you could look up in a manual. Errors have evolved to be more of “error messages” which then have grammar, word choice, and a million other concerns.

I wonder why message code culture disappeared now.

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