We started with a language called Portugol or "structured Portuguese" which is something like a formalized pseudo-code language and was used to teach the basic concepts of structured programming: variables, control flow, subroutines.
We spent about three months working with Portugol exclusively, never actually running it on a computer, but just for understanding programming logic. After that we moved to C and eventually "C with classes" C++. Comments were still written in Portuguese.
The transition to C was fairly easy in my experience, because the actual English vocabulary you need to understand to program in C is very small, and because the concepts themselves were taught in Portuguese with Portugol, so you only had to do dictionary translation, really.