I’ve run into a similar-ish situation working with East-Asian students and East-Asian faculty. Me, an American who wants to be clear and make policies easy for everybody to understand: worried about name ordering a bit (Do we want to ask for their last name or their family name in this field, what’s the stupid learning management system want, etc etc). Chinese co-worker: we can just ask them for their last names, everybody knows what Americans mean when they ask for that, and all the students are used to dealing with this.

Hah, fair enough. I think it was an abstract question to me, so I was looking for the technically correct answer. Practical question for him, so he gave the practical answer.

You should have asked how they would encode the german currency sign (€ for euro) in ASCII or its german counterpart latin1/iso-8859-1...

It's not possible. However I bet they would argument to use iso-8859-15 (latin9 / latin0) with the international currency sign (¤) instead or insist that char 128 of latin1 is almost always meant as €, so just ignore the standard in these cases and use a new font.

This would only fail in older printers and who is still printing stuff these days? Nobody right?

Using real utf-8 is just too complex... All these emojis are nuts

> I just never understood why I, as the non-German, was forever the one trying to convince them that Germans would probably prefer to use their software in German...

I've heard that German is often one of the first localizations of (desktop) software because there were often super-long words in the translations of various concepts, so if you wanted to test typeface rendering and menu breakage it was good language to run through your QA for that.

There are some valid reasons to use software in English as a German speaker. Main among those is probably translations.

If you can speak English, you might be better of using the software in English, as having to deal with the English language can often be less of hassle, than having to deal with inconsistent, weird, or outright wrong translations.

Even high quality translations might run into issues, where the same thing is translated once as "A" and then as "B" in another context. Or run into issues where there is an English technical term being used, that has no prefect equivalent in German (i.e. a translation does exist, but is not a well-known, clearly defined technical term). More often than not though, translations are anything but high quality. Even in expensive products from big international companies.

> I just never understood why I, as the non-German, was forever the one trying to convince them that Germans would probably prefer to use their software in German...

I cannot know, but they could be ideological. For example, they had found it wonderful to use plain ASCII, no need for special keyboard layouts or something like that, and they decided that German would be much better without its non-ASCII characters. They could believe something like this, and they wouldn't say it aloud in the discussion with you because it is irrelevant for the discussion: you weren't trying to change German.

I know someone who changed name just to remove the dots and have an "easier time when travelling"