When I contracted out at Nissan, the funniest thing was listening to the Japanese engineers try to speak Spanish over the phone to the plant in Mexico.
The second funniest thing was working on the Japanese version of Windows 95. This wasn't just a Japanese character set, it was the whole suite, including Office, in Japanese. Oh, in Japanese, you get a dolphin and a fairy for animated Office characters.
I had to apply a fix for 100+ Japanese systems, one at a time. I had an eight-page script of screen shots showing me where to click on each button.
After about the first 20, I had the sequence memorized, and could just fly through the routine. I had more than one person comment on how fluent I must be in Japanese. I quickly explained my trick, because I didn't want them to engage me in chit-chat while I was upgrading their software.
The funny thing is, the Japanese keyboard and character set is difficult for even Japanese to use, because it's a limited, compromised version of written language, made especially for computers. They generally have to parse each display character to get its meaning, making for extremely slow reading. And the DBDC Japanese keyboard requires them to assemble a character out of a top and bottom half, with special shift and function keys.
Whie seving in Korea ('87-'88), I saw and goofed around with a Korean* typewriter. I remember mainly that it seemed to have just a few more keys than a QWERTY, built three-letter syllable groups automatically and had at least one special button that skipped a space allowing for a two-letter syllable group (such as the syllable "long e", usually tranliterated as "i".
/pointless rambling
Off for coffee.
*For those who don't know, Korean is mostly a series of consonant-vowel-consonant syllables which are written in phnetic syllable groups. Example, their word for themselves is, iirc, hankooksaram, roughly Korean People, written in phonetic characters han-kook-sa-ram.