I think that even an arbitrary name (e.g. quark colors blue, green, red) is easier to digest/process/memorize over a person’s name that may be from a language you are not familiar with. However that also points to another problem. How do you translate? Do you force the word from the discover’s language on all other languages or do you translate it? If you translate then you are introducing drift but if you don’t translate then the word is just as effective as a foreign name. It’s almost like you would have to come up with a table for the concept in all common languages. So while names suck I don’t know what would be better.
I think you make a great argument with the translation problem. English is a second language for me, and many of the people that studied with me at university didn't speak it at all so clases were as much in Spanish as it was possible. Things like "bubble sort" where translated to things like "ordenamiento de burbuja," etc. There were two problems with that: one is that not all authors used the same translation and second is that information in non English languages tends to be more outdated or not even exist at all on the web so many times I had to try and guess the right name in English when I wanted to understand something better.
Now that I have a job a similar problem appeared with translations, Microsoft has this annoying habit of translating useful technical error messages and many times the error in Spanish doesn't yield any useful information on Google searches (if at all) so I'm again having to guess-translate terms into their original form.
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