i want to use korean translations under in my - quite large - wxwidgets application. The application uses the wxwidgets translation framework, which is based on gettext.

I have working translations for french, german and russian. I want to go unicode anyway, but my first question is:

1. does my application need unicode support to display korean and japanese languages?
2. If so, - just for interest - why does russian work without, since they have a cyrillic letterset?
3. I have thousands of string literals. Do i have to prepend each and every one of them with 'L' ? ( wxString foo("foo") --> wxString foo(L"foo") )
4. if so, did someone build a regex or sed or perl script to do this in ca. 500 .cpp files ? ( pleeze! =) )
5. Will this change in wxWidgets 3.0?
6. Unicode question general: i use these string literals in many descriptive and many technical ways .. as displayed text as well as parts of GLSL shaders as well as XML. These APIs have char\* / const char\* as function arguments, so my internal wxString representation should not matter in these areas. Theory and practice: is this true? Some experiences to share, anyone?
7. I do some text processing ( comparing, string finding etc ) - are there any logical differences in unicode vs. ansi?
8. Is there any remarkeable performance impact in using Unicode?

Thank you!
Wendy