I'd say you lose nerd points not just for not bothering to look it up, but for failing to recognise that the "English" term you mention is, essentially, Latin, and therefore very likely to occur in languages related to Latin.
Getting slightly more on-topic, I've found that being multi-lingual means you end up thinking about things in the language you normally use to communicate about them in. So, for example, I end up thinking about university administration in Finnish, the upcoming presidential election in Swedish and computer science in English. In part, this is simply to avoid making the effort to translate (for example, the admin staff at our university is predominantly Finnish-speaking), but also because some of the terminology may be unfamiliar in some languages (the more esoteric a subject is, the more likely it is that everything I read about it is in English) or simply not standardised.