Geopolitics, Growth and Global Tech: The Unicode Advantage

“The Union shall… promote economic…progress…through the establishment of economic and monetary union…includ[e] a single currency in accordance with the provisions of this Treaty…”

Treaty on European Union (aka the “Maastricht Treaty”)

It was the year 2000, and the European Union had chosen a new currency to reflect the needs of the new political and economic entity. All countries in the European Union were migrating from their old currencies to the new Euro currency. This would impact not just the physical bills and coins used, but also technology: how would financial services’ technology reflect the new Euro? How would a bank display both legacy currency and the Euro? How would a user even type the Euro given that it wasn’t on keyboards? And how would you ensure that when the Euro was electronically transmitted across the world that it would be understood, and not mangled into incomprehensible text? 

As a program manager on the Windows International team at Microsoft at the time, I’d been asked to work on this challenge for our Windows products. This would require updates to character databases, fonts, dictionaries, currency information, keyboards, and much more. How would I approach this problem?

This is just one example of geopolitics influencing technology. Our ever-dynamic world impacts technology in ways unexpected to technologists, businesses and end users. These changes can reflect economic shifts, changes in national identity, language use, border movement, among others. As such, these impacts result in businesses needing to update their products, either to address emerging legal needs or user expectations. How can companies respond to the changes they must make in their product to reflect these geopolitical shifts?

Geopolitical Shifts are Constant

With the digital transformation of businesses, governments and households over the last 25 years, many geopolitical shifts have necessitated updates to technology, beyond the Euro example: 

• On 1 May 2019, Japan began a new imperial era with the abdication of Emperor Akihito. This necessitated updating the Japanese calendar across technology platforms to use a new ideograph (Japanese character) representing the new era. 
• During the COVID pandemic, China made a push to ensure that all citizens’ names were available for digital banking and government services. Because of how names can be created in ideographic languages, this meant that a number of citizens had names that were not available in technology prior to 2020. China updated their official name list, and now requires that all technology offered in China support this new set of names. 
• A 2022 Quebec law (“Charter of the French Language”) requires any company that provides products and services to Quebec residents to comply with the language requirements in its online offerings.
• In 2021, the country previously known as Turkey changed its name to Türkiye.

And lest this movement in geopolitics be considered occasional aberrations, here are some other recent examples demonstrating that geopolitics are ever-shifting and technology must be respectively updated to reflect these shifts: 

• At the moment, Saudi Arabia is in the process of updating their currency symbol.
• Kazakhstan is transitioning their writing system from Latin to Cyrillic, as part of the country’s “Kazakhstan 2050” program. This means that any technology provided to Kazakhstan will eventually have to transition language technologies like calendars, keyboards and dictionaries from Cyrillic to Latin.

How Do Businesses Adapt?

How is a business or a technology provider supposed to respond to these geopolitical shifts? Who has the expertise or capacity to make these changes in their technology to reflect geopolitical reality and ensure customers have the culturally-tailored experience they need in their country and language? 

And crucially, how can these updates be made accurately, appropriately, and in a way that is interoperable with world-wide technology? For example: 

• How can end users, businesses and other organizations ensure that a new currency symbol is recognized like a currency symbol for use in spreadsheets, bank websites and other financial technology? Without this information, financial institutions cannot accurately reflect monetary values, ultimately creating a risk for large monetary amounts in digital transactions.

• How can Japanese users ensure that their Japanese-era calendar has the culturally appropriate symbol for the new era and a new emperor, such that a date is accurately represented?

• How can a user ensure that their name can be typed, saved and transmitted in a document, or a website, without it disappearing or being corrupted into another character? Or seen merely as a box or question mark?

Unicode Empowers our Digital World

With the mission of “Everyone in the world should be able to use their own language on phones and computers”, the Unicode Consortium in part exists to solve these dynamic geopolitical updates for the world. It is indeed a global public utility upon which the digital world relies. 

What started as a standard for character encoding, the Consortium’s work has expanded to a robust portfolio of code, libraries, and products that supports time zone changes, currency formatting and exchange, sorting order, imperial v. metric conversion, search for emoji based on language, scientific notation, and much more that many of us can take for granted.

Technologists who build and update their tech stack with Unicode by design have a head start on geopolitical trends impacting their businesses, whether that’s ensuring staff payroll processing works the right currency in HR systems, retail websites use the correct currency formats, the name of a country is properly displayed or a consumer can search for an emoji in their language and get the right results. Any business with a regional, global, or multilingual footprint needs to get these details right, and Unicode is key to providing world-ready technology. 

Microsoft’s Response to the Maastricht Treaty

Back to my Euro implementation challenge in 2000: how did Microsoft solve this? We leveraged the work and guidelines that Unicode provided for the Euro currency. While there was still work to be done on Microsoft’s side, working with Unicode in our tech stack ensured that we had an interoperable and culturally-relevant solution across all of our products, reducing engineering costs and accelerating our ability to bring the updates to markets around the globe.

The work that Unicode does to provide these technologies and data does not happen automatically, or in a vacuum. Geopolitical updates to technology require analysis and thoughtful collaboration from across language, technology, government and legal sectors. The Unicode Consortium consists of global stakeholders, including big and small technology companies, linguists, typographers, academics and government partners. This ensures that updates to its offerings reflect current geopolitical, linguistic and cultural needs, and maintain technical consistency, resiliency, and interoperability. 

Because of Unicode’s membership and engagement model, the organization has been well positioned to address geopolitical shifts in technology. 

Unicode Makes a Difference – Because We Work Together.

As a non-profit, Unicode relies on its members, donors, and volunteers to expand and support this essential global public utility for your organization – and the greater good. To learn how you can get involved, contact us at [email protected] or visit our table at SlatorCon. 

In the meantime, be sure to invite your team to the 3rd annual Unicode Technology Workshop, hosted at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus, November 11–13. They can join leading internationalization engineers, program managers, linguists, and others from across the industry to explore the future of global-ready software.

Details: https://www.unicode.org/events/utw/2025/

Image credit to Pixabay