I’ve left comments (including in IDs) in English, Spanish, French (most recently on something identified as inconnu, which turned out to actually be said fish), and Portuguese. I don’t think I’ve left a comment in Italian, which I’d probably baraguinate as badly as Portuguese. I’ve been in Portugal and Brazil, but for only two weeks each and over a decade ago, and I last had regular contact with Italian when I lived in San Francisco decades ago. How about you?
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I’ll use Spanish if the observer is using it. I’m nowhere near fluent and sometimes have to look up the right terms, but it’s nice to expand my vocabulary a bit.
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Ich habe manchmal auf Deutsch geschreiben et en Français aussi, parce que j’ai diese spräche à l’école gelernt.
(I hope that didn’t hurt anyone’s head too much…)
I do use google translate to check myself, because I’m not much good at either language tbh, and I haven’t had much opportunity to practise since ‘l’école’, which was a fair time ago! But when I have the time and the inclination, and I’m not trying to say anything too complicated…
(and no, I didn’t use Google translate for that top sentence, obviously!!)
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Sometimes I use a translate app to write in the language of the observer (usually Spanish because that’s a language I have enough familiarity with to be able to give the translation a vibe check), but I usually accompany it with the english version in the same comment too just in case it’s preferred or if the translation got butchered.
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I’ve written in all the languages. I use DeeplTranslator which is quite accurate when translating. I do that because I want the observer to understand what I’m saying. What if they are Chinese and don’t speak English?
I sometimes check the profile of the observer and then use Spanish or German accordingly, in all other cases English. Those are the only languages I know and I haven’t used a translation program yet (though DeepL is quite good). I’ve had French at school and still understand some when I read it, but can’t produce an understandable sentence.
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Most of my observations are in Portugal and since I’m native in Portugal I usually ID and comment in Portuguese. However I use english as well in international IDs. But if it must I’d use my spanish and indonesian knowledges
Just a couple in Spanish. Nowhere near fluent, but its also the only other language than English I can get along well enough in to manage.
English is the de facto lingua franca on iNat, not surprisingly, but its nice if you can add comments in an observer’s native language. I’ve added some comments in Spanish but I’m not fluent enough to be very confident all the time that I’m expressing myself well. The on-line translator apps are a huge help.
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I go by where the observation is. My latest comment-with-ID was on a cicada in Brazil which someone IDed in the genus Cicada which is an Old World genus, and I apologized for my Portuguese, which is more like Portunhol since I visited Brazil over a decade ago.
If an observation were in China, I’d comment in English, since I know neither the Chinese language nor how to use a Chinese keyboard layout. If it were in Russia, I might try to write Russian.
when users is in and from south america in Spanish, when it is from Brazil or Portugal, in Portuguese, but in general i do it in English, because it is cool to practice with other users
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Basically, I’ll write in English, even if the observer is writing in another language. I feel embarrassed about this, but I’ve lost what little ability I had 50 years ago to speak Spanish and I am basically monolingual so I don’t have other good options. I have considered having Google translate my English to another language but I don’t trust it, especially since it can so easily mistranslate a word that is used both in a technical ways in science and a somewhat different way in normal English. (And you should see what it comes up with when it “decides” to translate scientific names into English, which it sometimes does!) I feel that the person I’m writing to can use Google translate and then at least that way he’ll be aware that the translation may not be what I intended. I do use Google translate to produce English versions of comments made in other languages by the observer or others, when I think the comments will be useful to me as an identifier.
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I will read German and French - but I write in English. Autotranslate works fine across those 3 languages. Afrikaans gets mangled by autotranslate - but I seldom see that used on iNat. I use iNat in English - while remaining aware, especially for Africa, that English may be the second or third language for an iNatter.
Yesterday an Emilia (new to me) daisy was IDed as Animalia - and I can imagine someone struggling with - what is that called ?
If iNatters already have 3 (human) languages then invented Botanese is a fourth, and appalling to spell across Latin AND Greek and the author of this thread taught us that Kalanchoe for example is Chinese.
iNat itself has its own jargon, which is nominally English. But random example ‘Research’ Grade has a particular meaning. As does Cultivated. Even Wild - yesterday a sea urchin on the seashore - carefully marked Not Wild, or a garden snail - is supposedly 
Wild. Beware the attack snails. See the many, many ‘Is this Wild’ threads on the Forum.
Same. If the user I am responding to uses a language I am not comfortable writing in, I will write in English (sometimes with an apology that I don’t know the language or don’t know it well enough to write it or a very brief greeting in that language if I have some rudimentary skills). The other person can use a translation tool to understand my comment if they choose, but if I used one to translate my words before posting them, I feel this might give a false impression of my language competence. I am also of the view that using a tool does not make me any less responsible for what I write than if I composed the words myself, so the only situation where I might consider using a translation tool to write (rather than understand) a message is if it is a language where I have rusty basic skills that would allow me to evaluate and (if necessary) adjust whatever the tool produces.
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English first and foremost, but German where I feel that the observer might be more comfortable with that. My hold on Spanish is insufficient to write anything of value for comments and IDs, and the less said about any other languages the better. I tried a couple of times to use an online translator for comments (if I remember rightly, in French, Russian and Ukrainian), but without feedback; don’t know whether it was worthwhile or not!
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I speak and write only in Italian, I use a translator and translate into English, except when it happens that the names of certain reports in the local language have a particular etymology and I also report that, in an attempt to also preserve the local ancestral culture in some way.
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I really haven’t settled on a way. If there are comments in English already, or the observer is obviously not from where I live, I always use English. If comments are in Finnish (my native tongue), I use that. Otherwise, it’s a coin toss. 
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I generally default to English as it’s my primary language, but I will occasionally use a translator app to translate longer messages into the appropriate language for a user (usually Russian, though I think I’ve translated to other languages like Spanish before).
Danish and American
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Nothing but english. I can talk in a few indian languages, but writing is my weakness.
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