I don’t often recommend articles from a rival publication, since (of course) Compliance Week delivers every bit of information our readers could possibly want. But an essay from the Wall Street Journal’s latest weekend edition merits an exception.

The July 23 article, “Lost in Translation” by Lera Boroditsky, explores how differences in language shape peoples’ thinking. That is, the very way a person speaks and understands his native language can cause his brain to develop differently than the speaker of another language. Ultimately, two people who speak different languages might even have different natural abilities to, say, sense which direction they’re facing, or to recall events they’ve seen—all because the act of speaking their native tongue forces their brains to develop differently.

Somehow, I suspect that concept resonates with chief compliance officers whose employees are scattered all over the world.

Boroditsky, a psychology professor at Stanford University who studies linguistics, gives a great example from Spanish and Japanese. In both languages, a native speaker would see a vase accidentally knocked over and describe it as: “The vase broke itself.” In English, however, we instinctively assign responsibility to someone: “John broke the vase.”

But here’s where it gets interesting: Native Japanese and Spanish speakers, when viewing an accident, are less able to remember who did it. Their years of speaking a language with that blameless syntax hard-wires their brains to put less focus on responsibility when watching an accident. Likewise, Boroditsky gives the example of an aboriginal tribe in Australia that describes spatial orientation in terms of “east” and “west” rather than “left” and “right.” Its tribesmen have a better sense of direction the rest of us. Russians use more words to describe shades of blue, and have a sharper visual ability to distinguish shades of blue than someone who speaks English. You get the idea.

So often when I talk with compliance officers, the conversation turns to the challenge of convincing non-US cultures to obey our laws, rules and customs. Under the best circumstances, we face uphill battles winning over employees in Europe, who already have a natural inclination to the same values and habits we consider normal in the United States. When we talk about cultures even more alien from ours—Africa, the Middle East, and above all China—the battle seems hopeless. One friend of mine, the former CCO of an electronics distributor with an extensive presence in China, expressed frustrations that I’m sure sound familiar: “How do we reach people who seem to have fundamentally different values from ours? I mean, to their mind, of course you give the contract to your friend or brother-in-law—what sort of person would not do that? They just see things differently than us, and I don’t know how to cross that gap.”

I don’t know how to cross that gap either. Boroditsky goes one step further, raising the idea that perhaps we can’t cross it at all. That’s little solace to compliance officers doing business globally, I know—but it’s certainly food for thought. Read the article if you can.

Compliance headaches have gone global this week, from Nigeria to China.

First, Royal/Dutch Shell finally blinked and settled a civil lawsuit against the company about to start in New York. Relatives of Ken Saro-Wiwa, a Nigerian civil-rights activist hanged by authorities there in 1995, had sued Shell under the U.S. Alien Tort Claims Act for alleged complicity with the government in Saro-Wiwa’s death. Shell agreed to pay $15.5 million to Saro-Wiwa’s family and the survivors of eight other activists executed along with him.

Second, China has announced rather Orwellian plans to require all personal-computer makers that sell PCs the country to include special Web-blocking software with each unit. Ostensibly this is to block citizens’ access to pornography sites, but practically this system will allow Chinese authorities to “update” the list of blocked sites much like your central IT department sends out security patches to your desktop.

To my thinking, both of these events are near-misses for corporate compliance departments: mildly ominous developments that expand, yet again, the list of worries you need to keep in mind. The Alien Tort Claims Act, for example, has gone from a historical chestnut on the law books (it was passed in 1789 and hardly used for centuries) to something rather like a right to private action under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act: anyone, living anywhere, can sue any company in U.S. courts for providing assistance to a government that does something the plaintiff claims is dangerous.

I recently conducted a podcast interview on the case with Jonathan Drimmer from the law firm Steptoe & Johnson, and man, this stuff seems hazy. How do you craft a code of conduct to insulate yourself from Alien Tort lawsuits? How do you enforce compliance?

The Chinese ruling could also be a ticking time bomb. You can’t wave off compliance with regulations from the world’s largest consumer market—especially one where various government agencies have very cozy relationships with each other, that Westerners often can’t quite perceive. Compliance with the rule itself should be simple enough; either install the blocking software onto the PC’s hard drive, or include a disk carrying the software with the PC’s packaging. That’s a hassle, but it’s not really hard to do.

But there’s something decidedly un-American about cooperating with another government’s censorship efforts. I could even foresee some crafty dissidents from Tibet or Taiwan suing U.S. companies for their cooperation under the Alien Tort Claims Act. And all for a rule that, I’m sure, clever Chinese hackers will be able to circumvent in less than an hour.

Welcome to the global village, folks.