Bob, Compliance with translation requirements for safety is a regulatory requirement in many countries within the EU, but you are presumably not talking safety for your software interface?
This means that primarily you are concerned with supplying a product that carries out a particular function after your customer has interfaced with the software in some way. Perhaps for the US market you have menus for your customers to follow and perhaps a help menu in case they get stuck? Consider that you were trying to sell two products having identical functionality in the US marketplace, one was available in American English only whereas the other was only available in Danish (or other language if you'd prefer): by what percentage would the English product outsell the Danish one? Even if the English language product did not exist, how much of an uphill struggle would it be to sell a Danish only product? Of course, in certain technical areas it may be that you could expect customers to have a reasonable grasp of the English language, but that is specific to your potential customer base and is something that you will need to address in your marketing strategy. You also ask about warrantees. Here you need to look not only at legislation dealing with language itself but also about legislation regarding implied terms in contract. In the consumer area at least there is legislation that effectively null and voids unreasonable terms in contracts (such as exist when you purchase a piece of software from a high-street shop and install it on your PC at home). However, if you wanted to include a limitation which (let us say) is considered to be reasonable if written in the language of the country concerned, then would it be worth the paper it was printed on if it were in a foreign language - I rather suspect it wouldn't? Regards, Richard Hughes Safety Answers Limited
