Special mention of the expression “the west” which Americans like to use to mean the USA and some amorphous blob I don’t really want to think about but I’m going to pretend is exactly the same as the USA.
Somehow related, expressions like "next summer", "starting this spring" and such on public global announcements make absolutely nonsense if you are in the southern hemisphere (like a big percentage of the global population)
Maybe you are not aware but while it is summer in the northern hemisphere in the southern hemisphere you have winter (and so on). So, speaking of seasons means exactly the opposite depending on which hemisphere you are.
What's wrong with using a calendar date like may the 1st? I know that there are other calendars too. But is more manageable IMO.
yes, many non US firms do exactly that for international announcements:
- use "second half of ", "begin of", 3 quartal of, etc.
- or a specific month if they want to be more precise
also for western focused announcements they also use "holliday session" as their tends to be a holliday session in most countries in both summer and winter (through their start differs _a lot_, but it tends to just work out if you release early enough)
> use "second half of ", "begin of", 3 quartal of, etc.
And they sometimes use their internal fiscal year, which doesn't align with the calendar year. So sometimes, when they speak of the "fourth quarter" of an year they are talking about the beginning of the next year, or in the opposite direction, they might speak of the "first quarter" of an year but they're talking about the end of the preceding year.
The meteorological dates for "summer" correspond to June 1 to August 31. That straddles 2 quarters and both halves of the year. What are you going to do if a product launch is in July (+- 1 month)? You can't really use Q3 or H2 because neither of them fully captures that 3 month period.
Yes, I neglected to qualify "summer" with "northern hemisphere", but the substance of my comment doesn't meaningfully change with or without it, nor have I denied in other of my comments that "summer" is ambiguous depending on which hemisphere you're in. You're clearly just looking for stuff to nitpick.
London is in the global west, except for the whole thing with the Greenwich Meridian going through… Greenwich, east London. Not to be confused with East London, which is in South Africa, which fortunately is also in south Africa.
The UK is definitely in the west of Europe though.
This is the sad truth. I have a translation/localization company in the US. When pitching investors, first/second gen immigrant investors were always very interested, while multi-gen Americans would always ask "but what's wrong with google translate?"
Americans have a very strange and tunnel-vision world view.
I blame most of this on the fact that when you turn on any news channel, in an average 1 hour new program, less than 10% of the time is spent talking about anything outside of the US (and when they do talk about international news, it's always tied back to how it impacts the US - no one is listening to international news just for the sake of knowing what's happening in the world)
