Tian says,
"I bought this carton of cranberry juice from Spar in Austria today. I was amazed by the number of languages were printed on the carton. A total of 28 languages! 16 of them printed on one side, and the rest on other. In U.S., we would be lucky to have two or three, English & Spanish or French."
Reader comment: Andrew Gray says,
FWIW, including this many languages is a fairly popular trick – it complies with the legal labelling requirements for a couple of dozen countries at once, meaning you don't have to repackage the product (or design new packaging) for each different country you want to sell it in. Very useful if you have a business plan that involves selling material to supermarkets across Europe, or if you don't know at the outset quite where you're going to sell the product to. In the UK, and I guess elsewhere in Europe, you often find strange things like Arabic-labelled cans of Coke or Sprite, produced somewhere for a Middle Eastern market and then rerouted here. Each one gets a little red sticker with the obligatory content labelling placed on it, in English, to comply with the regs… you can see how it's more efficient to pre-empt it by printing it in advance.
The biggest density of languages I've seen, though, was the old Soviet rouble banknotes – they had the denomination written on them in all fifteen official languages of the individual SSRs, using four different alphabets, all on a single small slip of paper. See, eg, Link.
