You talk about Unicode being the right technical approach. But is it being accepted by the market?

The industry is converging on Unicode for all internationalization. For example, Microsoft Windows is built on a base of Unicode; AIX, Solaris, HP/UX, and Apple's MacOS all offer Unicode support. All the new web standards; HTML, XML, etc. are supporting or requiring Unicode. The latest versions of Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer both support Unicode. Sybase, Oracle, DB2 all offer or are developing Unicode support.

Most significant application programs with international versions either support Unicode or are moving towards it. For example, Microsoft's products were rapidly adapted to use Unicode: most of Microsoft's Office suite of applications has supported Unicode for several versions now. This is a good illustration--Microsoft first started by merging their East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) plus their US version into a single program using Unicode. They then merged in Middle East and South Asian support, until they had a single executable that could handle all their supported languages.