Japanese / Russian / Arabic

Simplest encoding method?

[rjohara]

I run an educational website in English, and have been gradually producing one-page introductions to the site in other languages, usually through the kindness of colleagues who do the translations at no or low cost. I may have an opportunity to get a quick translation into one or more of the above languages, and I want to make it as easy on the person doing it as possible (so they won't turn me down). The trickiest part of doing a non-Roman script is getting the encoding right, especially since I know none of these languages and can't easily correct mistakes I make.

Suppose my translator gave me a MS Word document with the text of the translation and indications of where the links go. I use BBEdit on a Mac and can save my HTML documents in most any encoding (UTF-8, etc.). Would I be able to paste from a Russian (say) word processing document directly into my text editor? I know there are several encodings for these languages, but would the best future-proofing strategy be to put all the web pages into UTF-8 if I can? (Assuming it's not going to be easy to re-do them later.)

Sorry this is a bit vague. I remember going through this once before when I tried to make a Chinese page - it's confusing when you don't know the language, the script, or the way to work with it in the editor.

[bill]

utf-8 would be great if there weren't so much resistance in the Japanese and Chinese markets. For one reason or another there seem so be lingering problems in these markets for that encoding. I am still warned by local programmers that utf-8 is not completely safe. However, I haven't run into any problems on Windows machines using any modern browsers. So I guess it depends on where your site is going to be used. If it's a PC browser only site then utf-8 seems to be a good choice for future proofing.

Copying and pasting depends on your editor and how your system is set up. A Windows XP system with all the Regional and Language Options set properly is a good start. Make sure you have all the target languages enabled first and there shouldn't be too many problems.