“Internationalization” is, roughly speaking, geek-speak for the process of supporting multiple languages on a website. For a company doing business in multiple countries, it needs to be done - otherwise you’ll risk losing the attention of people who don’t speak your development team’s native language. There are standards defined that specify what language to serve a website in to a particular user. So why do some of the world’s biggest sites get it wrong? Let’s take a tour of the landscape.

Road engineers in Costa Rica do not worry about snow and ice. Whereas highway builders in the US might dynamite a chunk of a mountain to provide a road that maintains a reasonable gradient as it climbs, the road engineers of the tropics are happy to run straight upslope if there’s no good alternative. Asphalt was laid surprisingly recently on some relatively important routes; the Costanera, for example, which is the coastal “highway” that connects Jaco to Paso Canoas at the Panamanian border, was only paved in the early 2000s. Old timer gringos talk of having to ford rivers in their trusty land cruisers in the bad old days of the late 90s, with teams of oxen standing by at either side of the river crossing to pull cars up the banks and back to the bumpy dirt roads.

People Love Institutions

Institutions are comforting and predictable. They bring some measure of order to the world, even when that order is rife with inefficiency. When we moved to Costa Rica, one of the surprising differences that we encountered was that there is no postal delivery service. Because there’s no postal service, there was never any need for mailing addresses, and so houses and businesses are often referenced by landmark. I shit you not, we visited a freight importer’s office whose address was “200 meters west of the Firestone”.

It’s fine!

We bought used cars when we moved to Costa Rica. There’s significant import tax on pretty much everything down here, meaning that it’s expensive to bring your car from the states, and also that the price of new vehicles is significantly marked up. I opted for a Toyota FJ - the secondary roads can get quite washed out during rainy season, and I wanted a reliable vehicle that could get me anywhere. Unfortunately, due to the cheery agreeableness of the tico agent we’d hired to help us find and vet used cars, and our wide-eyed gringo-in-a-new-country naivety, we’d missed that the FJ was both under-vetted and over-abused, which came to light only on the drive home when the dashboard illuminated in a sea of orange. In fact I’d been so sleep deprived (due to a fairly arduous move, which included our four dogs) during the purchase that I hadn’t even realized that this was a private party purchase rather than a purchase from a used car dealer (we’d conducted the transaction in the forecourt of what turned out to be a car wash, but that I’d taken to be a dealership), so there wasn’t even a warranty.