In reply to John Berglund.

Thank you, John, for your feedback. Of course, it is possible to use CVP engine to expand character lengths to accommodate foreign language transliteration. In fact, CVP engine does not care why you are expanding character variable length - it just does it. But you provided a valid use case for it. To do the actual character transliteration/replacement, you can use TRANWRD() function. For example, to replace all occurrences of Russian letter Щ in variable x to SHCH, you can use tranwrd(x, 'Щ', 'SHCH') .