Interestingly, in the world of electronics this used to be true too. The first Diode on a circuit board would be marked "D1", no matter which country produced it. Datasheets for components would be in english. Any text on a circuit board would be in english (ie. "Voltage Select Switch" or "Copyright 2025".).

However, a few years back it became common for most datasheets to be available in mandarin and english, and this year most PCB fabrication houses have gained support for putting chinese characters onto a circuit board (requires better quality printing, due to more definition needed for legibility).

Now there are a decent number of devices where the only documentation is only available in mandarin, and the design process was clearly done with little or no english involved.

Not everything changes though - gold plating thickness is measured by the micro-inch. Components often still use 0.1 inch pin spacing. Model numbers of chinese chips often are closely linked to the western chip they replace, the names of registers (in the cpu register sense) are often still english etc.

> Not everything changes though - gold plating thickness is measured by the micro-inch

Considering how much manufacturing and science etc. has fully migrated to metric, even in the US, this seems bizarre to me.

Like in machining, there's a long history of measuring everything in "thou" (micro-inch sounds proleptic to me, and you'll see "mil" used in the EDA space). All the tooling uses it, standardized components use it (I can drop a 74-series TTL chip from the 1970s in a modern board), and everyone learns it when they start using EDA.

Recently there has been a shift to metric in EDA software, so you'll see often see multiples of 2.54mm, and packages are switching to metric for the fine-pitch stuff. Often you'll have spacing in both units in the same design.

Not every day these days do I encounter a new word: proleptic.

1 the anticipation and answering of possible objections in rhetorical speech.

2 the representation of a thing as existing before it actually does or did so, as in he was a dead man when he entered. Compare with analepsis: the destruction of the Vendôme Column and his part in it are foreshadowed in moments of haunting prolepsis.

> this year most PCB fabrication houses have gained support for putting Chinese characters onto a circuit board

I've yet to see one of these in the wild, but it sounds cool to me and I would like to see it.

There's something of a problem the CJK languages have in not being able to do abbreviations or acronyms, so in Japanese you will occasionally see a couple of Latin letters standing out because that's much shorter than an inconveniently translated word.

> in Japanese you will occasionally see a couple of Latin letters standing out

I mostly encounter this watching anime, and I feel it stands out more than it should. It's not just the sudden shift to an entirely different family of glyphs - the overall typography feels off. There's room for improvement here.

> the overall typography feels off

It’s that ugly vertically-stretched serif typeface - the one used on those little gold-coloured “QA” stickers that used to be everywhere on/in consumer goods.

> Components often still use 0.1 inch pin spacing.

This changed with IC SMD packages. It's now mostly even 100-micrometers.

SMD passives seem to be in a state of limbo, but mostly still using inches. Mouser lists resistor size codes as both inch and mm. It's a bit confusing.

yeah, PCBs are a muddled mix. I've seen footprint drawings which use metric for some dimensions and imperial for others!

In my experience, you usually get English variable names / db schemas, localized chats and tickets, with internal docs, log messages and comments being a mixed bag.

For some kinds of software, localized names make a lot more sense, e.g. when you're dealing with very subtle distinctions between legal terms that don't have direct English equivalents.

I have worked in a couple places where some of the code was not in English, and it was incredibly annoying, like an affectation.

As a Swede I sometimes encounter new programmers using Swedish instead of English and it's incredibly jarring.

It's a little bit better if only the comments are in Swedish but it's still annoying...

Luckily it's very rare.

Until you start working on a code base made for something local only and with domain specific words. So much joy trying to remember how some word was translated for your code when a user reports a bug or ask for some new feature.

Bonus point when the people who decided to use English words are also all proud of their "DDD" architecture.

I agree. It makes sense when the code needs to handle domain specific words.

Based on my experience in Norway, it is common to use English but there is also not a complete surprise to find code in Norwegian either.

I remember looking at code written by a Norwegian government agency many years ago, and asking why they used Norwegian names for functions and variables. Didn't everyone use English? The answer was that they had so much domain specific terminology that it is not only hard to find English equivalents, it was so ingrained in the business logic that they don't want to risk any confusion and legal consequences. If a function was named validateFoo, then "Foo" had a single shared understanding.

Oh I'm working on a local only project right now and I also feel the pain of badly translated Swedish words. I've spent this week trying to decipher a section of code, trying to map then back to the Swedish concepts.

I've also experienced a similar situation in an English context where the concept is renamed on UI, while everywhere in the code it uses the old name. Then things are starting to mix with each other and then a new concept is introduced with the old name...

Fun times.

Considering Brazil and the Spanish-speaking people whom I've worked with, it's common for English coding to be the norm for the company/project, but many people are far from being proficient in English, so we end up with funny names that are often confusing or nonsense - I've seen an "evaluation service" that is actually a "rating service" (both could translate to the same in Portuguese). They often translate to false cognates too.

There are some business concepts that are very unique to a place (country-specific or even company-specific) with no precise translation to the English-speaking world, and so I sometimes prefer to keep them in their native language.