Yesterday, I asked my secretary to type and print some
certificates of appreciation that I was sending to employees
who work at the parent office of my company, in the US.
My branch of our company is located in Canada and is
staffed by Canadians, including myself. As some you
may know, Canada (and Australia, New Zealand, et al)
generally follows the British way of spelling words
versus the US way: centre versus center, colour versus
color, etc.
When my secretary typed these certificates up, and
she showed them to me, I noticed that she purposely
changed some of the words to the US style spelling.
I asked her why she did this, and she commented that
she normally did this on all correspondance to the US.
So I asked her if the US office sends correspondance
to us, do they change the spelling to the more
"international" style spelling. She said "Of course, not."
But she added a little sentence, that got me thinking.
She said "But we know that the words are spelled
differently in the US. If we send documents down there
with our spelling, they'll probably think I made a typo error."
It just made me think that some countries may refuse
to deal with the US using SI units on the belief that
the US market will refuse to grasp them. Of course, we
know that's not true. We've seen SI units in many
instances in the US (2 litre POP bottles, 35 mm film,
100 m races), and they're understood. This belief that
Americans can't deal with change (SI, spelling, etc),
could be a lot of the reasons why many foreign
countries insist on dealing with the US in ifp. They think
that they'll lose US marketshare.
That's my .02 (Canadian) or .0128 (American)
for today.
Stephen Gallagher
