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For a site in Asian and non-Asian languages, Unicode should be ideal. But there are some problems with older browsers, so you might need to encode in Big5 or GB for Chinese visitors. The encoding also depends on what part of the Chinese market you're thinking of (mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc.) I'm not sure how the latest Dreamweaver handles these encodings, but IMO you better first choose the right encoding.
It might help to read some threads at the Asia and Pacific Region [webmasterworld.com] forum like
Chinese Content - What is the best method? [webmasterworld.com]
Keywords in UTF-8 - Will local search engines convert it? [webmasterworld.com]
Unicode for multi-lingual website [webmasterworld.com]
Should I use BIG5 or GB?
On my site that targets mainland China I use the GB2312 character set. My headers look like this:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html lang="[b]zh[/b]">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=[b]gb2312[/b]">
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="[b]zh[/b]">I recall that Dreamweaver had some trouble with double-byte text input. (I don't have it, so I can't say for sure) So you may have to revert to a text editor when adding the Chinese.
Thanks for posting an example.
A recent version of Internet Explorer will ask the user to approve downloading the needed fonts etc. when opening a page in an 'unknown' encoding. Potential Chinese visitors won't have a problem if you make sure the pages use the right encodeing.
You should first decide what part of the Chinese market you like to serve. In message 7 of the Chinese Content [webmasterworld.com] thread you can read
Traditional Chinese Character are minly used in Hone Kong, Taiwan, and all the loacl Chinatowns around the world.Simplified Chinese is the official written language of the Chinese Government and so should cover Mainland China and perhaps Malaysia and Singapore.
In loose terms Traditional Characters are linked to Cantonese, whereas Simplified Characters are linked to Mandarin. However it is a loose link as Simplified Chinese is used throughout Mainland China even though the local Language or Dialect may be vastly different from that spoken in the Capital.
If you want to focus on both, you need pages in GB (Traditional Chinese) and others in Big5 (Simplified Chinese).
The file you receive from the translator will most likely be encoded correctly. So if you set the matching encoding in the header and the content doesn't change when you open it in your browser, everything is OK.
Big5 : Traditional Chinese
GB* : Simplified Chinese (gb2312, gb18030)
(Above post in UTF-8 may not render in all browsers)
