is it considered bad practice for users or spammy to google if you link to the english internal pages (because I don't have translated versions of them) using English and non-English anchor text?
To be clear on what you're describing:
Your site is in English overall, but some pages also have versions in other languages. Right so far? The question is what to do when there's a naturally occurring, useful internal link on one of the translated pages-- but the page you're linking to only exists in English. Is that the situation?
Sure, go ahead. Your visitors can decide for themselves if they want the information in English. You could either put the linking text itself in English-- for example if the page itself has a really good descriptive title-- or put a translated link with a note that you're linking to an English-language page.
In addition to human-visible links, make sure each page has a set of <link rel> in the head section, as described in the article phranque linked to. These are mainly for the benefit of search engines; possibly also for intelligent browsers. If you're not used to this format, note that "alternate" links always come as a package of two or more. Give a complete list of all versions
including the present page.
The site never seemed the same when we added translations.
Things are never the same after you change them. And then you panic and make more changes and things get worse. If you really don't think the pages are good and useful for humans, get rid of them. But if it's just a nebulous nostalgia for the site you had in 2004, get over it ;)
