topic Re: How do transactions made in non-English speaking countries appear on US card statements? in Credit Cards

How do transactions made in non-English speaking countries appear on US card statements?

BijouMan — Sat, 09 Jul 2022 01:48:42 GMT

Especially countries whose languages don't use Latin script?

Re: How do transactions made in non-English speaking countries appear on US card statements?

Anonymous — Sat, 09 Jul 2022 03:04:11 GMT

Don't have an example of non-Latin, but generally just the name of the business in the local language:

HMSHOST SCHIPHOL Schiphol NL 19.70 EURO

Re: How do transactions made in non-English speaking countries appear on US card statements?

core — Sat, 09 Jul 2022 04:12:40 GMT

Darn good question, and I'm eager to know the answer as well.

I would LIKE to think that Visa/MC support UTF-8 in merchant names, making the non-latin a non-issue. You'd think that would be easy enough to look up, but I'm unable to locate an answer. Just because a payment processor accepts UTF-8 doesn't mean it doesn't get sanitized along the way. But the beauty of UTF-8 is that it can be passed along by gateways and processes that know nothing about the encoding. Of course how it's eventually displayed to you by your bank is up to them. They may barf on it and show you jibberish characters if the charset wasn't properly set for output.

I'm also curious how all of this was handled before UTF-8 was invented? Seems like it would have been a nightmare.

Re: How do transactions made in non-English speaking countries appear on US card statements?

iced — Sat, 09 Jul 2022 12:28:46 GMT

Already been answered above, they show up typically show up like the following:

- C EST LA VIE TALLINN (Estonia)

- KOINOPRAXIA PLATINUM CRU ATHINA (Greece)

- ORNELLA, RESTAURANTE ITAL MADRID (Spain)

- AHS-KULJETUS, AVOIN YHTIO HAUKILA (Finland)

I don't have the statements anymore, but even Japanese/Chinese/Korean also renders in the Latin alphabet as that's what they had to enter when registering their merchant code and such. That's not to say you won't get receipts in UTF-8, because many places (even in the US) can and do use UTF-8.

Re: How do transactions made in non-English speaking countries appear on US card statements?

MrT_521 — Sat, 09 Jul 2022 15:29:02 GMT

My wife and I visited China a few years ago. This is a screenshot from my CSR statement.

I visited India around that time too. This is a screenshot of the CSR statement, showing charges made in Germany and India.