The following situation is given:

Office 2K SP3 professional with multi language pack, set to
German

I have a word document with a technical drawing that uses
textboxes to place technical notes all over that drawing.
These boxes contain "merge fields" that are drawn from an
Excel sheet.
The Excel sheet contains translations for each technical
note in different languages. This makes it easy to
translate the drawing into different languages including
polish and russian. I use the "arial unicode ms" font and
all text is displayed correctly in Excel.
When I update the merge fields in word, the special
characters of the polish and russian texts are gone. Polish
chraracters are displayed wrong and russian characters are
replaced by "?"s. BTW, the Word document also uses "arial
unicode ms".

Many thanks in advance

Karl