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Comment by md_rumpf | Hacker News Reader

My guess is a lot of these studies don't replicate as well in Europe vs. US.

Road signs in the US are predominantly text: PED XING. ONE WAY. DO NOT PASS. Where the European equivalents are all pictograms. Europe needs to do it this way, because the countries are so small you'd expect German-speakers driving in France and vice-versa: French-only text signs would be criminal. Similarly, a French-speaker can navigate a German train station without understanding German writing.

Europeans are actually much more attuned to deriving meaning from pictograms than their American counterparts.

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As a European, I cannot make any sense of the low-contrast pictograms in "modern" software (VS Code, Obsidian, etc.).

Ironically, Visual Studio introduced monochrome icons in the early 2010s, and the protestations were so deafening that they introduced colours back in.

Fast-forward a decade, and nobody even bats an eye. I also struggle visually navigating around VSCode when I'm not using a keyboard, but we seem to be a minority.

It is standard practice to translate software into many languages, whereas road signs cannot be.

What if the writings were English only would that be a sin?

I think English speakers have this innate expectation for the world adapt to them.

They Speak their native language and expect signage, menus, conversations, to be in English.

But if a person attempts to only speaks their own non-english native language, that's being rude.

I totally get your underlying point, but sometimes it comes down to pragmatism.

If one’s goal is for the world to work as efficiently and with as little friction as possible, then things like a single common language make a lot of sense.

For example, in most spheres of international business English is the common language. It’s not a value judgement about the importance of English or the inferiority of other languages – it’s just pragmatism as English is the commonest shared language that most people understand, whether as a first or second+ language.

French people don't do anything radically different on French roads and train stations than they do on German ones (and vice-versa for any pair of nationalities), but what one does in one app might be very different to another.

I came here to post about European washing machines, which are labelled with inscrutable pictograms instead of words. My own experience is that those pictograms are far less easily understood than words in a foreign language would be, at least to an English speaker who is familiar with cognates from the Germanic and Romance languages.

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