Question

I’m using google translate with my website to translate short, frequently used phrases. Instead of asking google for a translation every time, I thought of caching the translations in a MySQL table.

Anyway, it works fine for latin characters, but fails for others like asian. What collation/charset would be the best to use?

Also – I’ve tried the default (latin1_swedish_ci) and utf8_unicode_ci

Answer 1

One of those should do the trick:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-unicode-sets.html

Also, as seen in the MySQL documentation:

Client applications that need to
communicate with the server using
Unicode should set the client
character set accordingly; for
example, by issuing a SET NAMES 'utf8'
statement.

So, if you select the utf8_unicode_ci encoding, you will need to execute a SET NAMES 'utf8' query for every connection to your database (run it after a mysql_select_db() or whatever you’re using).