Interestingly, in the world of electronics this used to be true too. The first Diode on a circuit board would be marked "D1", no matter which country produced it. Datasheets for components would be in english. Any text on a circuit board would be in english (ie. "Voltage Select Switch" or "Copyright 2025".).
However, a few years back it became common for most datasheets to be available in mandarin and english, and this year most PCB fabrication houses have gained support for putting chinese characters onto a circuit board (requires better quality printing, due to more definition needed for legibility).
Now there are a decent number of devices where the only documentation is only available in mandarin, and the design process was clearly done with little or no english involved.
Not everything changes though - gold plating thickness is measured by the micro-inch. Components often still use 0.1 inch pin spacing. Model numbers of chinese chips often are closely linked to the western chip they replace, the names of registers (in the cpu register sense) are often still english etc.
Like in machining, there's a long history of measuring everything in "thou" (micro-inch sounds proleptic to me, and you'll see "mil" used in the EDA space). All the tooling uses it, standardized components use it (I can drop a 74-series TTL chip from the 1970s in a modern board), and everyone learns it when they start using EDA.
Recently there has been a shift to metric in EDA software, so you'll see often see multiples of 2.54mm, and packages are switching to metric for the fine-pitch stuff. Often you'll have spacing in both units in the same design.
Not every day these days do I encounter a new word: proleptic.
1 the anticipation and answering of possible objections in rhetorical speech.
2 the representation of a thing as existing before it actually does or did so, as in he was a dead man when he entered. Compare with analepsis: the destruction of the Vendôme Column and his part in it are foreshadowed in moments of haunting prolepsis.
> this year most PCB fabrication houses have gained support for putting Chinese characters onto a circuit board
I've yet to see one of these in the wild, but it sounds cool to me and I would like to see it.
There's something of a problem the CJK languages have in not being able to do abbreviations or acronyms, so in Japanese you will occasionally see a couple of Latin letters standing out because that's much shorter than an inconveniently translated word.
> in Japanese you will occasionally see a couple of Latin letters standing out
I mostly encounter this watching anime, and I feel it stands out more than it should. It's not just the sudden shift to an entirely different family of glyphs - the overall typography feels off. There's room for improvement here.
It’s that ugly vertically-stretched serif typeface - the one used on those little gold-coloured “QA” stickers that used to be everywhere on/in consumer goods.
> Components often still use 0.1 inch pin spacing.
This changed with IC SMD packages. It's now mostly even 100-micrometers.
SMD passives seem to be in a state of limbo, but mostly still using inches. Mouser lists resistor size codes as both inch and mm. It's a bit confusing.
However, a few years back it became common for most datasheets to be available in mandarin and english, and this year most PCB fabrication houses have gained support for putting chinese characters onto a circuit board (requires better quality printing, due to more definition needed for legibility).
Now there are a decent number of devices where the only documentation is only available in mandarin, and the design process was clearly done with little or no english involved.
Not everything changes though - gold plating thickness is measured by the micro-inch. Components often still use 0.1 inch pin spacing. Model numbers of chinese chips often are closely linked to the western chip they replace, the names of registers (in the cpu register sense) are often still english etc.