Want to make chinese translation of DB stored info

[nowski]

I've been researching this for a couple of weeks and cant seem to find quite enough information to make it work.

I have an IIS server with Coldfusion and a mysql database. What I want to do is set up a table that a translator can populate with simplified chinese translation of existing news articles.

I'm told I need to use UTF-8 or GB2312.
GB2312 doesnt seem to be compatible as a charset with ColdFusion but UTF-8 is.

My translator tells me it should be GB2312 but it seems that UTF-8 is the way to go - how do we reconcile?

[bill]

GB2312 is indeed more widely acceptable as an encoding, but if your translator is starting from scratch and can reconcile any problems that might pop up using UTF-8 then you should be OK. I'm not up to speed on all the issues with Chinese and UTF-8, but I do know that local encodings are still recommended for Chinese, Japanese and Korean projects.

[nowski]

not sure if they are savvy or not yet. I wonder if I should code it in PHP - does that support GB2312 out of the box or are there more issues with charsets that would need to be installed. As you can see, I'm new to regionalisation

[bill]

Most of the issues I've heard of deal with the end-user's ability to see the content. Keep in mind that people may be looking at your site on other hardware than just a PC, and their browsers might not be industry standard. This is becoming less of an issue though. Even sites like Google have been moving to UTF-8 for their Asian properties, so I take that as a sign that Unicode is becoming more acceptable.