added special case with an empty ICU chain for 'raw' index processing without call of transliterators, case maps or tokenizators. It's optimized such that the following happens:
if (!chain->sort), no utf8 to utf16 translation occurs, and the original cstring is returned for the icu_chain-get_norm8() call.
if (chain->sort), utf8 to utf16 translation is made, the original cstring is returned for the icu_chain-get_norm8() call, and the utf16->sortkey conversion is run previous of calling icu_chain-get_sort8().