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RE: Two different sets of experiences about non-English identifiers

• From: Don Park <donpark@d...>
• To: Joel Rees <rees@m...>
• Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2001 00:53:13 -0700

> You talk about the human factors. It seems to me that you are suggesting
> that the solution is to proselytize American standards all over the world.
>
> I am an American. I look around me at (for example) the Japanese trying to
> run a stable government under a rough transliteration of a mid-twentieth
> century idealistic interpretation of the US constitution and I am
> amazed at
> their resourcefulness. There is a lot of stuff in that constitution that
> simply works backwards, due to things we quite casually blanket over with
> the short phrase "cultural issues", wave our hands at, and try to
> forget. It
> was probably the best that could have been done, but it still creates
> problems.

 I am Korean American.  When I see Asian markets for technological goods,
software in particular, I see markets too small or too unbalanced to sustain
growth for native software market.    So foreign market is crutial to their
long term growth strategy, but most Asian countries do not have large
internal markets like Japan's electronic gadget market that can sustain a
small software startup while it gains the means to reach over into oversea
market.  Yes, there are OEM level software technologies from Asian countries
being sold/licensed in US and Europe, but amounts involved are too little to
fuel meteoric rise to higher lifeform.

However, there is too wide a cultural gap and language gap for most of them
to reach foreign markets.  If you go to a large bookstore in Korea, you will
see mountains of books on latest fad technologies such as Flash.  Just
couple of weeks ago, I saw about 20 different books on Flash, some Korean
translation of American books, but most were Korean original versions.
Anyone who educated themselves on those books will definitely have problems
communicating with American Flash developers even if they are fluent in
English.

Each Asian countries, practiced your 'locality of control' with vengence
without realizing that each word translated semantically or verbally amounts
to another brick on the wall that protects key foreign markets.  Your joke
about me being an imperialist pig is pretty ironic because I see 'locality
of control' helping to keep third countries away from US and European
markets.  Sure, Japanese market is big enough to afford the side-effects of
'locality of control'.  Heck, its big enough to hire Gaijin engineers and
marketeers who can help Japanese software companies to effectively penetrate
the language and culture barriers.  I don't think other countries have it so
good.

BTW, your comments and replies have been very informative.  Thanks.

Best.

Don Park
Docuverse

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