English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and to a lesser extent Dutch will get you pretty much the entire western hemisphere. They all use the same alphabet, all

English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and to a lesser extent Dutch will get you pretty much the entire western hemisphere. They all use the same alphabet, all read left-to-right, and are all SVO word order--except for Dutch, which is SOV/V2. Also, a US company will need a Spanish translation before it even considers French. Anyway, the point is that it is a lot easier to half-ass internationalization and localization for both of the Americas and the Caribbean than it is in Europe and Asia. That is just indisputably true. European coders must get that correct starting from version 1.0, whereas Americans can blithely ignore it for years.