[PROBLEM]
(Windows)
We tried to use an english application to input arabic data into a database.
The data was stored correctly, but the editfields in the application itself didn't display arabic, but useless latin characters.
[SOLUTION]
In e.g. Delphi, a TEdit field has the property "Font", and there you can set the CHARSET for this field. By default that's (guess...) - "DEFAULT_CHARSET". In Delphi, you get a hint about other charsets from a dropdown box in the Object manager (e.g.: "ARABIC_CHARSET")
The problem was, that an english windows has some LATIN_CHARSET or whatever as default, whereas that should be arabic to display correctly.
In WinXP there's some option to set the default charset for non-unicode applications. Switch that to the language you want (e.g. Arabic) and the application should be able to display the right charset.