I was advised by the Answers Microsoft community to post my question here.

Here is the original post:  http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2013_release-word/can-anyone-offer-some-guidelines-regarding-the/21ac9135-4d16-49d0-9524-046c1645d844

To elaborate, I don't know Arabic so I can't really see what is going wrong, if anything.  

The basic process is as follows:

1. The Arabic translations are sent to us in Excel spreadsheets.  
2. The phrases get copied into (Telerik) textboxes in a Dot Net 4.0 web app that I wrote myself.
3. The phrases get saved to a SQL database in nvarchar fields.
4. The phrases are then used in a Mail Merge through a view that reads the required fields.

According to our translator something is going wrong.

For lack of a better question, are there any basic 'gotchas' I should be aware of when processing, copying, and mail-merging a foreign right-to-left oriented language such as Arabic.  (I'm told we'll be doing a couple of others as well, such as Hebrew and Urdu.)

Hi,

So basically you are doing a mail merge right from SQL Server right? In that case you might have to set the collation to another setting. My guess would be that Latin is used and somehow the characters are getting messed up. You should run a simple query in SQL to see the output. If at all possible export the output from SQL to Excel to see what the actual output is. Hard part for you is that you cannot verify what the output should be because it's Arabic. You should ask the translator for details on what's going wrong that way you start looking for a solution.

Maurice

The collation is SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS.  This db has to handle multiple languages and alphabets at once.

I was under the impression that making the necessary db fields nvarchar was all I had to do to handle multiple languages/alphabets.  

Is this a misconception?

Hi,

You are right, in some cases it's enough just to set the Nvarchar fields in Unicode. However since you are talking about sequences of translations that might be wrong that could be because the sequence of the collation is not set correct. Have a look here:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms186356.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396

I am not stating this is the solution but it could be the part that takes care of the issue you are encountering. See the discussion here about not setting collation and arabic characters:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7781103/sql-server-set-character-set-not-collation

and there ar many more discussions about this topic. So remains the question to ask about the translation that is not being correct. Try to get explained what exactly it is that is not correctly translated.

Maurice

If you want to send me one of the Excel workbooks, I will see what I can do with it.

You can send it do dkr[at symbol]mvps[dot]org

Hi,

Just checking in to see if the information was helpful. Please let us know if you would like further assistance.

Melon Chen

Forum Support