Character handling before the introduction of Unicode was very complicated and subject to a variety of norms depending on the language. Because of increasing internationalization, Unicode(tm)-compliance is becoming more and more important. Nowadays the major operating systems, programming languages, and many applications such as TRADOS Translator's Workbench support the Unicode(tm) standard. This presentation is intended to discuss the impact of Unicode on translation memory technology and the localization industry. How does the introduction and standardization of Unicode(tm) affect the database of a translation memory tool?