SilvaVoc, which is IUFRO's clearing-house for →terminology, is building a forest →terminology database and has planned to publish it on the Internet. Non-Western languages such as Japanese, however, have some problems in multilingual databases, and present Web browsers have a limited capacity to manage multilingual functions. For example, Web browsers for English can not display French and Japanese on the same window, but new technologies such as Unicode and HTML version 4.0 have been developed to solve these problems. We propose the following solutions to manage multilingualism in a fwdarwterminology database and in the Internet:
- to treat non-Western characters as images
- to display the characters using Java applets on Web browsers
- and to apply HTML 4.0 with Unicode.

The choice of these methods depends on the time of completion of the system. If there is enough time to wait until HTML 4.0 comes into wide spread use, a combination of HTML 4.0 and Unicode will be the best solution. However, other methods should be chosen if this wait is not feasible.