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For the last few months pundits across the political spectrum have written op-ed columns and long articles questioning whether geopolitical events such as war and polarized politics signal the end of globalization. All the while a skeptical friend asks, “How’s this globalization research thing working out for you? Is it kaput, fini, game over?” I typically narrow my response from Globalization writ large to discussing the more finite concerns of the best practices and technologies that allow the web and products to be global – and thus provide the foundation for global commerce, diplomacy, and other interactions among countries and people.
For the balance of this post, I mostly put aside the vexing geopolitical questions of post-war globalism and the social liberalism that accompanied it. Instead, I contend that no matter what happens, there will always be some level of international operations, that a variety of factors will always complicate them, that activities to address the growing complexity raises the bar for any organization operating in multiple countries – and that this reality will create new opportunities for anyone who can make those global interactions easier. Thus, the question of "Will we really need LSPs and corporate localization teams if machine translation obviates the need for translators?” will become moot for any organization trying to operate internationally in this new post-globalization era.
COVID-19 disrupted industry, government, and personal lives. It clobbered supply chains and led to some fundamental rethinking of many established aspects of business and personal life. It contributed to growing VUCA – volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity – that management theorists for decades have said characterized our modern economy.
From the beginning of the pandemic, there have been nationalistic and political squabbles about the source of the virus and objections to government responses to the pandemic. The fragmented global response has been just another example of a disruption in the force, the de-globalization of many institutions. The internet is one such institution – with implications for the content and services that any web-resident organization might want to serve to its target audience:
Turning back to the first of these two, a host of extraordinary and quotidian factors have been whacking away at the unity of the web ever since Tim Berners-Lee’s first HTTP communication between a client and a server in 1989. They echo the geopolitical and nationalistic challenges that have disrupted the force of post-war globalism:
Six years ago, I traded in my quartz wristwatch for a waterproof smartwatch. I read the online documentation to figure out how deep I could take it – 50 meters, or far deeper than my daily laps and 10 meters beyond my Deep Diver certification. From the manual I learned about the features that distinguish my simple timepiece from a grande complication (that is, a chronograph).
That’s a good metaphor for our post-globalization website challenge. Think about the combinatorial complexity of geopolitical and simply-required-to-work issues at play for global websites in this deglobalizing era, we are now in the territory of plus grandes complications. First there’s the question of the various splinternets – will your content and products pass political, economic, or techno-nationalist muster everywhere it’s seen? A common trap has been territorial disputes with country names and map colorings. Similarly, if you allow user-generated content, do you verify it? Do you verify anything? Our research for “The Calculus of Translation” indicates that you most likely trust but don’t verify.
Let’s consider something less controversial: selling online. Can your website accept payments? Great. Can it charge the appropriate tax? The United States has more than 11,000 sales tax jurisdictions where tax rates must be resolved based on shipping addresses – and it’s just one of the frequently supported locales. If you do the math, you’ll find that a multi-country retail website has an extraordinary number of permutations. Managing it becomes extraordinarily complex as you move from the category of relatively generic global to localized to the hyperlocal ideal of a very targeted omnichannel user experience. Don’t try this at home – it’s time to get some professional help to deal with this burgeoning cardinality of website development and management – and the virtual geo-blocking that comes with it.
We advise most organizations to employ more technology and specialized service providers to manage the growing complexity and number of complications in the post-globalization era. They will require a combination of smart technologies and humans not only in the loop, but at the core as well.
The worldwide web has always been ambitious in scope but the “ww” part of it quickly splintered as governments, companies, and other organizations discovered the complexity of a medium that could conceivably reach anyone on the planet with a computer – sometimes with information they didn’t want that someone to have. The splintering to date might seem trivial as we move to Web 3.0 and the many manifestations of a virtual reality or simulation that we’ll see with the metaverse. These complications pose a great opportunity for LSPs and localization departments inside corporations and governments that can manage this growing cardinality of website and product localization in the post-globalization world.
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