Ok, thank you for your support.
I was hoping to find something existing but if there is nothing then I will see if I will do the work or just go with an extra database table to "translate" the string.
Some further information: It will run on Win and Linux. Database is mysql. Race results are CSV Files that I parse with perl and insert results to mysql. After that another perl script is doing the math to calculate the result scores according to ISAF (International Sailing Federation). The results are stored in mysql too and the last step is to create a HTML page with the results on the web.

It would have been nice to present the boat names as they are defined in the game but I can find ways around that. My time is limited at the moment and I am new to perl that was why I thought it would be good to ask if there is a simple solution.

Thanks and best regards
Thomas