Indeed, using your english.xml and renaming it (in my case) to german.xml makes the game completely ignore the German.pak and switch to English, regarding the handled text in your english.xml (now german.xml) and taking all other English text that isn't translated in your english.xml/german.xml from the 'root' files. English is the language they developed the game in. If I understand everything right, they made the english.xml just for convenience (e. g. for translation into other languages).
