Not all countries in the world or organizations use one language. Some are bilingual, others support multiple languages. Data coming in from other sites might be in a different language. Museums around the world regularly share items, and the digital information relating to them might be in a different language.
The challenge for all these organizations is how to handle this data in the best way. The issues can be broken down to the following:
Storing
Displaying
Translating
Searching
All spoken languages can be represented in text; some phonetically, others in a representative structure. Different languages use different symbols to represent the pronunciation. Some languages use one symbol to represent a sound (phonetic), others use a mixture of one or more to represent the different sounds. Languages such as, English have introduced a large number of exceptions to this, so much that dictionaries need to include a pronunciation guide. English also has multiple symbols representing...