Capn,
No, I didn't miss the point. I have worked on a couple NASA programs that involved working with engineering groups in Russia, Italy and Japan. There were different units of measure used, there were different engineering standards used, there were different material standards used, and there were different languages. Did not have the type of issue described on any of these projects.
While working with the Russians on one NASA program, every document we supplied to them was translated and converted to ISO. But the engineering documents we received from them were just copies of their originals that we had to translate and convert ourselves. NASA management did not completely trust the data supplied by the Russians, and I recall spending a couple weeks creating a digital analysis model from their documentation to verify its accuracy.