Yes, see above.

a) Data redundancy is a bad idea on many levels

b) We really don’t know how search works and if it’s really neccessary

This should be shifted to the main project list, nothing will be resolved here. See e.g. others suffering from multilingual issuses:

http://gis.19327.n5.nabble.com/Re-Talk-hr-Names-of-towns-in-Istria-td5713372.html