It would not scale at all well, I agree. Luckily I'm not creating a multi-lingual dictionary, but organizing a list of english language radio show names. Occaisionally an accented character will come through, but anything else will be a surprise.

I did once work on an international Who's Who book. The ordering of names was "solved" by having romanized equivalents. But it was the editor's job to decide the order, not the mine.