Currently there are two supported language-aware mechanisms for full text search:
MySQL supports text search only for English and only for the MyISAM storage engine. MyISAM engine lacks support of the database transactions, therefore it is strongly recommended to use Postgresql.
Postgresql supports full text search in the following languages:
Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese (requires postgresql package textsearch_ja), Norwegian, Portugese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish.
To enable this option - just use the postgresql database and add in the settings.py file the corresponding entry in the LANGUAGES setting.
Note
Japanese language search in Postgresql requires installation of a “contrib” package called textsearch_ja
Apache Solr search supports more languages and Askbot supports Solr via the module called Haystack.
Here are detailed instructions on how to enable Solr on Ubuntu system version 12.04, which may be helpful for users of other distributions of Linux.
In addition to the basic set up of Solr, it will be necessary to configure multilingual search under solr.