Comment by skissane

3 years ago

> Then I don't have to, as an Asian, wonder how American school buses look like when I "click on all squares that have a bus"

It is funny how our five year old daughter can recognise what American school buses look like, simply through media exposure, despite the fact that buses in our country look completely different (and our school buses don't look different from public transport buses, since they are the exact same buses and drivers, just scheduled on school routes instead of public ones.)

Sometimes I can get rather critical of American cultural imperialism, but this kind of thing is more at the amusing than concerning end of that spectrum. It is a good example though of how many American businesses are happy to offer their products outside the US with minimal or no attempt at localisation–and either don't realise the reality of that lacking localisation, or do yet don't care. It is particularly a problem I think with other English-speaking countries, where people just assume that if the language is the same everything else must be, or else their idea of the differences is limited to a handful of well-known items like date formats