As a german who worked as a software dev in the netherlands for 2 years, I could't disagree more. The dutch speak a great english, even the homeless. I've never heard a better american style english anywhere else in europe and I found the dutch english often more clean than even received pronounciation.
Same goes for the code bases, they had the usual mess that codebases have but variable names weren't an issue.
I find your example of childs vs children to be bike shedding, the hard part about coding isn't the variable names. If you read haskell you would probably find "c" for child and "cs" for children, simply to keep the code terse.
While I strongly condone the form of backlash you received,
I am still happy that there is pushback.(sorry)
We as software devs battle complexity on a daily basis, and we achieve many of the things we achieve only because of collaboration.
Introducing an additional translation step into the process of coding sounds like a complexity nightmare, a debugging nightmare and a communications nightmare.
When working in an international team you still have to talk about the stuff, and as long as something like this doesn't ship with a perfect star trek like universal natlang translator people still have to settle on one language, except that the code they are looking at is now code they've never seen before.
Kudos for the effort, go do it as a hobby but don't be suprised that people get mad just by the very thought of being forced by management to work with something that puts even more complexity onto their shoulders.
And I'm happy that people want collaboration so bad that they are willing to speak and work in a language that they don't understand well in order to connect with peers from all over the world.
And don't take it personal that others don't digg the idea of having to work with something like this.
It's a cool idea, it didn't work. Move on and try the next cool idea, one day one of them will stick.
You're not the only one to have worked on something and then figured out a year into the project that there is no demand/ its technically unfeasible / there is some obscure paper from the 70s that had the same idea but discovered a fundamental flaw and dropped it.
To quote allan key:
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough.