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

[BijouMan]

Especially countries whose languages don't use Latin script?

[Anonymous]

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

[core]

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.

[iced]

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.

[MrT_521]

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.