As i was facing the same issue today, i digged a little and instead of creating a new question i'd rather get this one answered ^^'. It seems that the only possible way to achieve this is by code (C# & visual studio) or use this little workaround that works just fine :
- Create your column with an internal name (you can always take a look at the following link for naming conventions but the internal name should always be different : Link)
- Rename the column with the display name you want, but add a hard space at the end (alt + 0160), the space being trimmed by SharePoint when the column is saved. You can do this as many times as you need for columns that should have the same display name (i can see the need behind it, as long as you use content types to sort them it should be fine).