Content Publishing Class: Part Two

I attended part two of the content quality class today. We talked about globalization, localization, and geopolitical issues. Globalization means that we make sure that the content we produce is not focused on United States issues, and does not use United States-specific pictures and symbols. Localization is the process of creating a version of the content for another country or region; that includes translating the language of the text and making other changes to fit into a specific culture. Geopolitical issues are things that are considered inappropriate in some cultures or by some people.
It's hard nowadays to write about these things without using the terms "other markets" and "local consumers," since that's the terminology that marketers and even general business people use. Even right to our face on television, and in ads and reports. I guess it's considered neutral, business-sounding language, but I don't much care for being called a "consumer" as though that were my primary and only worthy attribute in life.
Anyway, we have a fair amount of process in place to check for geopolitical issues, and to aid globalization. We have tools that we run over all of our content checking for potentially offensive terminology, we have internal Web sites devoted to educating us about global and local issues, and we have experts assigned to each division who can answer questions we might have. But still, too often, problems sneak through. The worst part is that apparently people think of these mistakes as deliberate acts, when they are really misunderstandings, technical glitches, or ignorance. Not that any of these things make the problem any better, but at least they are not malicious.
Fortunately for me as an editor, the content I review doesn't have much reason to include things that are geopolitically sensitive—it's pretty much straight software developer information, talking about writing code. But still, it's important for me to keep up with these areas of knowledge, because I don't want to have a "bite the wax tadpole" incident in my documentation.