By the virtues of Perl Monks I came across an interesting entry in the blog of Dan Sugalski who is the designer of Parrot, the interpreter engine for Perl 6.
In that post Dan talks about strings. He explains a lot of problems that come with different human languages and how careful one should be when dealing with multilingual strings. It is an interesting and insightful read. There are few other posts on the subject too, in case you want to go further.
For those who decided to skip reading, I’ll repost his excellent advice free of charge.
Important safety tip–never get a tattoo in a language you don’t understand. “Baka” is not Japanese for “good fortune”