Well, it'd be a lot easier if most US entities understood that M/d/yy(yy) format is rare, or that default to Frankenstein degrees is pretty much the same/awkward (even Microsoft reset their weather widget to F on regular basis).
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.
I acquainted with a guy at a conference in US and he was genuinely surprised I had no idea, how long US mile is. I explained him, we use metric system and his response was “but don’t you learn *the standard* system in ache school?” I did not know, how to respond.
AFAIK USA people learn both systems in school. So it understandable if they are not aware that the rest of the world don't know about their system, miles, inches, feet, gallons, pounds, etc, unless they are into American culture (books, movies).
One of the things that USians are taught in school when they learn these two systems is that everyone else uses metric. We're typically taught it in our science classes, because even in the US, scientists still use predominantly (exclusively?) metric. It follows that there's no parallel reason for most foreigners to learn US imperial units, especially in an institutional setting like public school.
> 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 is also an abundance of people who don't speak English, or prefer not to, right here in North America. The Canadian province of Quebec, for instance, legally mandates bilingual signage and generally prefers French. And Mexico is right there too.
There are also a great many families in the US whose first-generation members have limited English.
Languages as in knowing two systems. Sort of like how most people don’t need to know international date or thousands/decimal separator conventions, but those functioning internationally—whether due to being well travelled or senior enough to conduct international trade and/or relations—do.
My going to a conference in India and arguing over the lakh/crore system isn’t useful to anyone [1].
Even then, continents have little to do with it. The Indian numbering system is indeed used in much of Asia - but it's not used in Russia for example. If you live in Vladivostok, you might need to learn these two systems even if you never do business with anyone farther than 300km from you.
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.
> (1,000 is 1000 in France or the UK or Spain, but 1 in Germany or Romania)
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:
I am not sure it's fair to include Canada in the same basket. We don't use freedom degrees, we know that numbers should start with the most significant digits and I believe liability waivers have no value here as well.
4-20-10 (quatre vingt dix) is weird for non-French speakers, as "siedemdziesiat" is weird to non-Polish speakers, or any other word in a foreign language.
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.
> surrounded by a vast market/culture (US +Canada)
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.
> And navigation on Android / Google Maps can't pronounce French names for streets/places while driving around in bilingual places in Canada.
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.)
I agree. I would guess it might not be that difficult for Canadian people as they are all to some degree exposed and as such familiar with both languages' sounds. But I remember the first couple times I was in China a good decade ago, it was much easier for me take the older subway lines than the newer ones in Beijing.
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.
Huh? No, when driving in Quebec or Ottawa etc, there might be an "English" way to pronounce the names (like the kind of thing my anglo self would use, bad pronounciation but making an attempt), but it doesn't do that... it actually just reads out this weird literal phonetic output as if it was an English word and it's unrecognizable to anybody from the area or anybody who grew up in Canada and has a basic idea of how these words are pronounced.
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.
Google outright ignores Accept-Language: en-US and randomly resets your cookies to use the local language based on your IP. They've been hiding the link to change back to English more and more too and have started to show local language search results above english ones (e.g. for Wikipedia) even with the interface set to English. I have nothing but the worst wishes for those responsible.
There are plenty of English place names with surprising pronounciation too. I don't think out software should encourage us to stay ignorant of the proper pronounciation - it's not like the map software is the only place wehre you are ever going to encounter spoken place names.
> 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.
The spelling of +Canada is very much on purpose (no space). I am very much aware Canada is metric and bilingual.
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).
L/100km is standard, especially because our roads use km measurements. I use both KPa and PSI. Measure my personal weight in pounds, but doctor and etc work in kg. Trades people work in both, by necessity. (My father was a machinist / tool&die maker who trained in Germany... drove him nuts).
It's just the reality of "sleeping with the elephant" as the expression goes here. We just have it worse than Europe.
Google Nest prononciation of EN songs names in middle of sentence in other language was fun to ear. It’s been a wile it does pretty well (way better than at the beginning at least) so they probably have the tech to achieve street names prononciation.
I always prefer, default to, and advocate for yyyy-MM-dd format for dates to avoid confusion. Once you're used to them, no other format will do. Also, files with such names (backups, etc) will also be in a natural order.
I started to refuse to accept any document that does not have the YYYY-MM-DD format, and time as HH:MM. I also encourage people to use UTC because we work in 130 countries so 15:27 does not make much sense.
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.
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.