I will try and have a look at this tomorrow. This is surely meant to work but couldn't find any existing tests, very odd.

Maybe adding a doLoadTranslation here would be a way to do it:
https://github.com/doctrine/phpcr-odm/blob/master/lib/Doctrine/ODM/PHPCR/Query/Query.php#L183

It seems that it would be ideal to add a $locale argument to the loadDocumentsByPhpcrQuery, but that cascades then to findMany() (which can then pass the locale hint to the unit of work getOrCreateDocuments method).

But by this logic we should add the $locale argument to all of the document manager methods (including persist). If that is a good idea or not, I don't know, but I guess its out of the scope here.

Another option would be to add translation aware methods, e.g. getTranslatedDocumentsByPhpcrQuery, findManyTranslated.

But I vote for @dbu s suggestion for now.. and we could create an issue to solve this in 2.0

the only other option i see would be to remove the possiblility to specify the locale in the query builder. that would be more consistent with the rest. then we would say whatever you do, you need yourself to set the default locale if you want to change something about what the default locale is.

i think we can say that changing the default locale for a single call is out of scope of phpcr-odm, and you just need to change the default if you need this.

or we could offer some sort of wrapper-system where you can say $dm->defaultLocale('de')->find... defaultLocale() would return a dm decorator that changes the locale on the fly and changes it back.

Opened issue #623 to discuss how to handle this