Hi All!
I am new around here but not new to CiviCRM at all. I just wrapped up a complete mega hack of CiviCRM to have it work properly in Japanese for an internal Japanese Government Agency and pulled the backend to the front under a Joomla install. Joomla was also hacked away as well due to the lack of usable security hooks that CiviCRM could utilize. Drupal was not an option as per some opinions from the powers that be.
In any case, I have asked for permission for screen shots of the system to be posted, it currently manages about 4.5 million individual records with about 20,000 staff reaching in from various wards in Japan it is being run under a 12 month exploratory trial with a legacy system being run concurrently.
As a matter of curiosity we did not utilize the localization model as it would not have resulted in a properly functional environment for Japanese users. So we rewrote the tpls in templates and wrote a layer to switch template languages based on user parameters. We also need to hack the First Name Last Name relationships because we use three six distinct written styles in Japanese to represent names thus we capture 3 fields for First Name and 3 Fields for Last Name.
Something like this for you Anime fans:
First Name in Kanji: 明
First Name Kana: アキラ
First Name in Romaji: Akira
Kudos to the CiviCRM team for a great platform. I will post up the screenshots as soon as I have written approval.
