RSS language element?

I have feeds in several languages... is that ok?

[financialhost]

I have a job sector inside my website & i plan to add RSS feeds. The problem i have is that i am a newbee when it comes to RSS & some elements are a little confusing to me.
I have a problem with the language element - as i have to specifiy language but the job sector is international & displays mostly jobs written in English but also jobs written in French, German, etc.

For several reasons, including technical & user input i can't seperate these.
Does anyone know what effect it might have on my RSS feeds both from a useability point of view & for SEO?

For example - will the foreign languages display ok in RSS clients if the language element is set to English?
Will it have effect on search listings... etc?

Perhaps there is a way to specify several languages or secondary languages in the elements?

Any help or advice apprecated?

[encyclo]

The trouble is that with RSS the

language

element is only associated with the

channel

, not with each item. You have three possible solutions: the first is to omit the

language

element completely as it is optional (though recommended). This will at least remove any confusion about non-English content in a channel marked as English, but it makes the content of the feed less obvious for feed parsers and aggregators.

Your second choice is to look at the Atom syndication format as a replacement for RSS. I don't know Atom very well but I believe you can assign an

xml:lang

attribute to each item. UA/aggregator support is questionable, though.

The final and perhaps best choice would be to simply publish separate RSS feeds per language. This solves the technical problem with the

language

element, and has the advantage that most end users would probably prefer a single-language feed rather than a multi-language one.

For the appropriate display of the characters on other sites, you should publish the feeds as UTF-8 rather than a legacy encoding.