Processing Multilanguage Data with YAJL, RPG and a PF

I see prior posts but did not know how to reply to that thread...

Did someone get this to actually work? I tried what I thought was the simplest path but never could get Brad Stone's example to get past precompile failures on the statement...
Exec sql Declare :value VARIABLE CCSID 1208;

System is running 7.1. I'm going to try the ICONV next but thought there might be a quick trick.

Basically, we are just trying to decode an incoming JSON that has a variety of languages in some element/nodes. Then we want to save to table/file (CCSID 13488/1200 perhaps on that field/column. Down the road, we'll grab that value and create an outbound JSON to send to a REST API.

YAJL Stringify does seem to work but it super slow, so I'm looking at alternatives.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!