Searching for products in multiple languages?

So we have an interesting dilemma. We sell products that have a variety of different titles in multiple languages.



I initially hoped we could include the additional foreign language titles in the search when the language was set to English in the cart, but I cannot get the foreign characters to register in the search bar. They turn into special characters and do not match.



The problem we have is that customers looking for these products are looking for the Greek titles. However because the search for Greek words doesn’t seem to work correctly when language is English, I have added Greek as a language and experimented with the process.



The user can switch to Greek, but this wreaks havoc in certain blocks where, for some reason, they are not appearing in random locations, etc. This could be fixed, but it is not a quick fix. However, when the cart language is EL the search for greek titles (even the quick search) works flawlessly.



What I would like to be able to do is allow the search function to search all languages and then pull the correct products, even if they are searching for the Greek title on the English side.



Right now the search seems to be segregated - When the cart is in EN, only the EN product information is found. With EL, the same thing. I’d like to be able to search across all languages regardless of the language being entered and the language on the front end.



I am going to look through the code to see if there is a simple way to do this. My fear is that the result set will have duplicate results for every language if, for example, the EL description for a product is still just a duplicate of the default language description. Only one product should be returned - regardless of the language used to find it.



Has anyone else had to tackle this yet? Any thoughts or strategies on where to start looking?

I am working on the same issue. Did you figure out anything smart regarding this?

Did anyone figure it out? Please help me with this issue, I have multiple languages in my store

Did anyone figure it out? Please help me with this issue, I have multiple languages in my store

For example, you can put titles from other languages to the Search words field with the Import/ Export functionality