[adrianmonk]

Lore from an old company of mine says that we had the opposite of this happen. We had an opportunity to expand from the US into China. So a dedicated team spent months localizing our English-only software into Chinese.

Our sales people traveled to a key meeting with execs at the Asian division of a multinational corporation (the potential customer). They did a big demo to show the software working in Chinese, hoping to impress the execs with how the software was ready to go.

The execs awkwardly said essentially, "Hey, that is probably great, but even though we handle the Chinese market, we don't speak Chinese; it's only our customers that do. So we couldn't tell what your software does, and we wouldn't be able to use this. Do you have an English version?"