The orthographical complexities of Chinese, Japanese, Korean (CJK) and Arabic pose a special challenge to developers of NLP applications. These difficulties are exacerbated by the lack of a standardized orthography in these languages, especially the highly irregular Japanese orthography and the ambiguities of the Arabic script. This paper focuses on CJK and Arabic orthographic variation and provides a brief analysis of the linguistic issues. The basic premise is that statistical methods by themselves are inadequate, and that linguistic knowledge supported by large-scale lexical databases should play a central role in achieving high accuracy in disambiguating and normalizing orthographic variants.