NCHAR and NVARCHAR for Foreign letters in English application

HP-UX 11 IDS 7.23 Hi Family, this is the prodigal Jake asking for help. We have an application that deals in book titles in char columns and commentary text (like book reviews) in blob columns. Usually these are all in English. My users now want to include Spanish and Italian book titles and commentary text (can German and Russian be far behind?) intermixed among all the English language records in the table. These have accented, umlatted and upside-down characters that want to be able to enter and display in their application. I am an GLS dummy and in my ignorance, my prejudices lead me to believe that setting the language support environment variables imply sets the language of the locale. So if I set for client in Spanish, I won't be able to enter or display accurate stuff in English. Is this correct? Somehow, I suspect that converting the data-types from CHAR to NCHAR (or VARCHAR to NVARCHAR) is not going to be enough to handle mixed-language input. I believe the applications are written in JAVA, which is very friendly to extended (16-bit) characters but NCHAR data type does not seem to be 16-bit characters. My initial response what that extended text could easily go into BLOB columns because the engine give not a rat's tail for the data contained in blobs and a JAVA application could handle it without working up a sweat. But foreign characters in the CHAR columns will confuse the application and possibly the engine when transferring data to program variables. Sounds too vague and answer for me to accept from myself. Can anyone please help me get started on a reasonable response? The main question is: How much effort would be requires to retool the application to accept characters of multiple languages in a single table? As for the inevitable RTFM responses: I'm searching for that Guide to GLS as I type this. (Going for Belt & suspenders approach here. ;-) Thanks much. +-------------------------------- Jacob Salomon Jsalomon@bn.com --+ |When you exit this vehicle, please be sure to lower your head and| |watch your step. If you fail to do so, please lower your voice | |and watch your language. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+