I have a problem that is messing with my head.

I am building a solution in 7 languages.

Thats fine but it will also be used by a company with 3 locations.

UK, Germany & France

The problem comes in when the contacts addresses are entered.

I have a database with 200 countries and its great but when i enter the address from the UK and select from the country list (which i would like to be comprehensive my users may enter the name of the country in there native language or the localized language (if they got a business card from there client). To add to this issue the native name in each 3 locations is different.

This makes for a very long list of countries and to be honest the data looks ugly and all over the place. Especially when sorting data. Oh and if user A in the UK sends a letter to client A in Spain but the address was entered by a user in Germany using the native name it could be a problem for the postman.

Anyone got any thoughts on how to structure or tackle this?

Nope, but god knows i feel sorry for you :

Can you put the countries into continents?

I think users should not enter the country name, but select a country code from a value list (which can be filtered by continent or the first character). Each country in the Countries table must have alternative names (selected by a gLanguage field). If you want to use these in a value list, I believe you will need to put them in a sub-table, so the VL can be filtered by related only.