EDI Docs not in English

[ALeisk]

My employer is considering widening our customer base such that we will accept
EDi documents from customers in Asia using Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc. We
are currently on WORLD on our AS/400 in English Only - we do not have
Double-byte options enabled, nor do we particularly want to bring our whole
system to double-byte for what we expect will be only a small percentage of
our business.

Does anyone have any experience with sending and receiving EDI documents in
multiple languages but keeping the core system in English only. Is there any
way to do this!?! We do not need to display the Japanese on any of our
internal screens or printed reports. The only place we might want to print
would be on a packing list. Other than that we hope to limit foreign
languages to EDI documents.

Can anyone on this list provide me with guidance as to how to begin this
project.

Thanks in advance.



Andy Leisk
Stratagem Inc., I.T. Consultant at Banta Corp.
(Rent-a-programmer and AS/400 computer janitor)
920-751-4434

 

[dale_draper]

Hi again Andy, I've thought a little about this, and I think the only way
this could ever be done would be jointly with your business partners so that
you'd say; " Location A = X in language a, Y in language b and Z in english"
and so on and so forth. Then you build up a little translator program
identifying of the of z=y=z's you've built up.
But I think you'll still need to go to dbl byte just to recognize the
characters, but I've been wrong before.
Have you asked your prospective business customers if they are not already
transmitting EDI docs to english speaking business'?
There must be a standard protocol out there, I'd think, and it's proably in
english, the language of business worldwide (aren't we lucky?)

 

[Ekeck]

There is a server program X01100 which will translate based on the country code. We print Japan Invoices using this. Hope it helps a little. The files must also be set up to support double byte (CCSID) We have double byte set up on our machine and a library with the transaltion characters. Hope this helps.

Regards,
Eileen

Hi again Andy, I've thought a little about this, and I think the only way
this could ever be done would be jointly with your business partners so that
you'd say; " Location A = X in language a, Y in language b and Z in english"
and so on and so forth. Then you build up a little translator program
identifying of the of z=y=z's you've built up.
But I think you'll still need to go to dbl byte just to recognize the
characters, but I've been wrong before.
Have you asked your prospective business customers if they are not already
transmitting EDI docs to english speaking business'?
There must be a standard protocol out there, I'd think, and it's proably in
english, the language of business worldwide (aren't we lucky?)