Non-English Shotglasses

Over the years, I have obtained a number of shotglasses with designs that contained words that were not in english. The majority of these use the english alphabet or, as with the cyrillic alphabet used in Russian, are close enough that I could enter them "as is" into my database. There are a few glasses that incorporate writing in languages that do not use the english alphabet, such as Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, and Korean.

I have been thinking about how to enter these descriptions into the database, but since I do not speak any of these languages, I have not really given them much thought. I recently had a co-worker translate some hebrew shotglasses for me, and now I am confronted with the a more detailed dilemma.

I can think of three ways to enter these glasses:

• Do I enter the description for these shotglasses in their original form, in their original alphabet - !????? ,
• Do I enter them in a "transliterated" form L'Chayim! (li-KHAY-eem -- like Adam Sandler says "The C is silent in Chanukah" ),
• Do I enter the translation of the word(s) -- "To Life!."

None of these is the perfect solution. When I put a description in the database, I think about people searching for that glass. If I use the translation or transliteration, finding the glass would require some knowledge of the original language. Putting the original characters in the database requires figuring out how to allow non-english inputs on the search form. I believe the best solution is to to do all three, but I will create a separate page that lists the different non-english designs. Here's the page with the first couple of items, including one from Pickvet.

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