It’s tempting in the current geopolitical context to make quick ‘n dirty contrasts between Europe and the U.S., or between older and newer bits of Europe. But of course there’s nothing novel about transatlantic competition in most spheres of business and community life. The European Union is constantly benchmarking itself against the U.S. (and also Japan) on such issues as R&D spending (Europe must do better), the number of high school kids who want to study science (Europe must do better), and indeed, innovation culture as a whole (Europe must… etc.).

At the same time, Euro-chauvinists are quick to highlight areas where Europe clearly has apparently done better - mobile phone usage, the ancillary joys of texting (a.k.a. SMS), the environmentally sensitive enterprise, and natural flavenoid consumption to keep that blood flowing (in vino veritas…).

Yet it’s not easy to identify the specific advantages of Europe’s cultural and linguistic promiscuity. Managing bilingualism in countries such as Belgium and Switzerland has hardly provided any relevant cost or process models to the localization industry (Canada has done much better in this respect), and on balance, the trend among European multinational companies has been to slim in-house linguistic variety down to a single lingua franca (or occasional bilingualism), rather than to encourage proactive multilinguality.

Certainly, Europeans have pushed the technology envelope in such areas as machine translation usage, and it was the European localizers of predominantly U.S. products who first developed such productivity tools as translation memories and terminology management systems. It is also no accident that project management and localization integration skills received a strong impetus from Ireland’s unique experience as a concentrator of global expertise in multilingual product and customer relations management.

We are learning, however, that every geography has its own inherent multilinguality and multiculturality. And that locale – code talk for the customer – is an inherent feature of any market, however ‘mono’ it might seem. Marketers in the supposedly-mono U.S. are developing an acute sensitivity to ethnic market differentiation as sources of new revenue. Europeans will gradually discover that their own country markets are in fact mini-Europes, populated with customer niches that alert marketers will wish to target as specific locales. If Europe has a lesson to teach, it is precisely that markets are fractals: the global pattern of market differentiation is re-enacted at each level the deeper one digs. Region, country, locale, language - ‘the customer’ may be a far more literal and singular entity than we first thought.

What makes it possible, of course, to approach this fractal nature of markets is the technology that leverages content as asset. Due to emerging standards in content exchange, and converging technologies for content management, it is becoming increasingly possible to add locale-sensitive capability to all of our data. So Europe is best seen as a marketplace of markets, a test case for constantly localizable niche content. Divided we stand.

This issue of the Globalization Insider highlights some of the ways in which that content can be further tailored to the ideal customer base of one. While Ashish Vora and Curtis Tuckey provide the first of a very detailed two-part overview of how Oracle’s voice applications will provide a new channel for individual customer access to content, John Olsen of Stibo makes a strong plea for enterprise-wide management solutions that can handle all types of corporate content, including but also going beyond the Web.

In a healthy boxing match on commoditization (premium content), Eugene McGinty and Donald Barabé speak openly about issues that many of us mutter about only out of earshot: : Is the localization industry, for all intents and purposes, already commoditized, but we just can’t admit it? Is it possible for the industry to price itself appropriately to deliver on the promise of ROI? And in a new installment of Industry Buzz, a Director of Sales for a well-known localization services provider thanks all of us for making his job easier by not uniting to make this industry truly standards-based. Are we listening?

So yes, Europe is the paradigm case for thinking about language and locale – both fractal and fractious. Which bodes well for the GILT industry when it meets at the 2003 LISA Forum Europe for two days of intensive interaction between new and old, global and local, ROI and ROW.