The number of US tech businesses that are surprised they need, or think they can ignore the need, to obey employment and data protection laws when working in other jurisdictions is simply bonkers.
The root of issue, not understanding local laws/culture, is very similar - surrounded by a vast market/culture (US +Canada) dulls your senses for the rest of the globe.
It’s just a difference in travel and seniority. If you aren’t talking across continents there is no need to speak two languages.
Continents have nothing to do with this. If you live in the UK and need to talk to people in the USA and Australia, you can be monolingual and still speak with people in three continents. If you live in Switzerland, you may need to speak 3 languages just to be able to talk with all your neighbors.
There are also a great many families in the US whose first-generation members have limited English.
This also goes notwithstanding the indigenous peoples, whose Diné bizaad and Tsalagi, for example, are also spoken here.
My going to a conference in India and arguing over the lakh/crore system isn’t useful to anyone [1].
And in Europe there are numerous differences between countries of this kind - Germans and a few others use different number separators (1,000 is 1000 in France or the UK or Spain, but 1 in Germany or Romania). Several places drive on opposite sides of the road. The UK uses many imperial units. I'm sure there are others I haven't even come across yet.
Got it, you’re parsing continents literally. I was speaking colloquially. Read it as “cultures” in the first comment.
No, France and Spain follow the same standard as Germany: dots as thousands separators, a comma as the decimal separator. Actually most of Europe does the same, the only exceptions being the UK and Ireland:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#/media/File:...
Am curious: where does that not happen in the US?
(And in parts of Canada they say 4-20-10 to mean 90 :-)
To us French this is a word like others, it's not like we are calculating in our heads. Belgians have "septante" which is more logical but they do not calculate either.
It happens with dates and makes them unsortable.
The worse offender on this I suspect it's Apple. Where half of their localization stuff doesn't work or works in a weird way
US companies don't think about Canada as anything but an afterthought, and struggle with the same issues here that you just mentioned.
Canada is metric, uses different spellings (closer to UK English.. colour, not color [Chrome just marked my spelling as wrong despite me having Canadian English as my setting]) and is officially bilingual with localization laws requiring companies to provide French versions for certain kinds of services. US companies either don't bother, or usually get this entirely wrong.
e.g. It's been how many years? And navigation on Android / Google Maps can't pronounce French names for streets/places while driving around in bilingual places in Canada. Just completely butchers them, their system can't "understand" the concept that you could have your language set to English but still need to hear French place names, or vice versa.
Honestly, I think this is the right approach, and I'm speaking as a bilingual French/English speaker.
Google Maps doesn't know that you are bilingual. So it has two choices: pronounce words the "right" (i.e., native) way, or pronounce them the "English" way. If someone who is unused to hearing the native pronunciation, their understanding is going to be impeded. Google Maps tells you for example to turn onto Passage du Grand Cerf in a French accent, a non-Francophone is going to have a harder time finding that.
(Now, okay, maybe you should have a way to say that you're bilingual and want to hear the French pronunciation, but I understand why they don't do it.)
On the old lines, they had what sounded like a native English speaker do the announcements of the upcoming station, including the station name. On the newer ones it sounds like they just recorded the "we're arriving at" bit once and then spliced in the read-by-a-Chinese station name, which is much harder to understand as a foreigner. So on the new lines I was constantly staring at the displays.
I'm not bilingual but I'm British and the most irritating thing driving through France is hearing Google/Siri butcher French words. It makes it basically impossible to navigate!
I imagine most Brits would be able to hear a French word (spoken slowly enough) and recognise it written down.
Even, like, names ... Duplessis or Cartier or whatever... just completely unrecognizable.
Or take the way it reads out the exits off the 401 in Toronto, reading the full bilingual sign (where there is one) with the English first and then the French part as if it was a continuation ... in English ("Sud" read out like you'd say that if it was an English word, hard D and everything.) Clearly, they should just drop the French part, but their system can't comprehend that a sign could be bilingual. Because America.
Look, I don't speak French, I'm not bilingual, and it drives me nuts when I'm in QC or even just Ottawa etc. I literally can't tell what street it's talking about, it doesn't correspond with the sign. It's incoherent.
What's mind boggling is that Google navigation is completely fine reading out Spanish words when I drive around California. C'mon.
But it does know, e.g. "Accept-Language" header. Of course, google resent that part and travelling across Europe results in having a different language every day.
> If someone who is unused to hearing the native pronunciation, their understanding is going to be impeded
Circular reasoning. If common software used the right pronounciation more people would be used to it.
Due to the proximity of US (tooling/documentation), lots of the trades still operate in non-metric (or some unholy combo). Most folks would be a lot more familiar of PSI when it comes to tyre pressure (compared to bars), etc. I don't know if L/100km is the standard unit to measure fuel consumption (efficiency).
It's just the reality of "sleeping with the elephant" as the expression goes here. We just have it worse than Europe.
I have to work with logs from computers and applications and this is driving me nuts. "What is the timezone ?" is the question everyone fears.
That's Fronkensteen.
https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/gua...
But after 1 year you have to show that it's the vendors fault instead of the vendor having to show it was your fault so often "de-facto" 1 year.
Various exceptions include for stuff like food, underware etc.
I think this one is understandable.
What's wrong with using a calendar date like may the 1st? I know that there are other calendars too. But is more manageable IMO.
Usually it's because they want to keep it vague because the exact date (or even month) hasn't been set yet.
- use "second half of ", "begin of", 3 quartal of, etc.
- or a specific month if they want to be more precise
also for western focused announcements they also use "holliday session" as their tends to be a holliday session in most countries in both summer and winter (through their start differs _a lot_, but it tends to just work out if you release early enough)
And they sometimes use their internal fiscal year, which doesn't align with the calendar year. So sometimes, when they speak of the "fourth quarter" of an year they are talking about the beginning of the next year, or in the opposite direction, they might speak of the "first quarter" of an year but they're talking about the end of the preceding year.
That is winter in the southern hemisphere.
I'm amazed at the need to have to explain this to a grown adult: https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/seasons/en/
Classic example!
In the US, people will normally assume you are talking about Christmas holidays. In Blighty, people will assume summer holidays.
London is in the global west, except for the whole thing with the Greenwich Meridian going through… Greenwich, east London. Not to be confused with East London, which is in South Africa, which fortunately is also in south Africa.
The UK is definitely in the west of Europe though.
Americans have a very strange and tunnel-vision world view.
I blame most of this on the fact that when you turn on any news channel, in an average 1 hour new program, less than 10% of the time is spent talking about anything outside of the US (and when they do talk about international news, it's always tied back to how it impacts the US - no one is listening to international news just for the sake of knowing what's happening in the world)
This is true for every large culture.