Quote Originally Posted by ArmyOfOptimists View Post
Maybe? It's 50/50 if we do that in real life. For example, we use "anime" a lot these days, but I remember back when a lot of people called it "Japanimation." We don't call Germany "Deutschland" and so on, either.
There's sorta rules about it. Countries generally get transliterated in some way or another. Place names can go either way, though river names have been historically extremely durable, to the point that one of the arguments for the complete genocide and removal of the original inhabitants of, IIRC, the Shetland Islands by the Norse is that all the waterway names are Norse. General things can go either way, depending to some degree I suppose on how alien a concept it is to the inheriting culture. Potato is a loan word from Spanish, where it's a portmanteau of two North American words. Maize is very seldom used in place of corn, a much older word that originally referred to wheat, which isn't miles away from maize-corn in use or cultivation.

In sci-fi it always makes me wonder why those specific words aren't being translated by the universal translator I assume we all have, too. Unless it's a truly alien concept, you'd think we'd get some sort of translation out of it. Their word might be "churg-un", but that translates as "planet eater" so why don't we hear that?
They same reason they're written in modern English, and not the substantially different 28th century Future English/Chinese/Reformed Neo-Martian that they should be in: a weighted combination of audience readability and flavor, generally weighted towards readability. But using a non-English word generally forces the audience to pay attention, so it works as both emphasis and a device to encourage engagement with specific concepts. You can translate 'grok' just fine, but by not translating it, you have to engage with the context and figure it out. This is generally more meaningful because it takes more effort, and allows the word to have a much richer, more cultural definition than a simple translation would provide. Tanith Lee does something similar in Don't Bite the Sun and Drinking Sapphire Wine, which have fairly rich set of what slang. She does provide the exact definitions, but by using the slang throughout the actual text it works to map you into the rather alien headspace of eternally bored immortal teenagers with nothing better to do than insult each other and commit serial suicide for kicks.