Q: I need to be supporting both Traditional Chinese (Big5) and Japanese (SHIFT-JIS) languages, as well as the default English (ISO-8859-1) language on my board. I understand that I can supply the two additional language files so that users can select them from their profiles. However, the problem is, if a member chooses Traditional Chinese as his preferred language, all his posts become garbage to users who choose the other two languages. The same goes with authors who choose Japanese as their default languages..
A: The only way to ensure cross-language compatibility for the web is to use the UTF-8 encoding and to store unicode in the database. Both Version 2.4.3 / 2.5 Unicode support all languages in the world.
If you are trying to mix, for example, German, Engish, French, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc.
you MUST encode all your language files with UTF-8, and then
set the charset for each language to UTF-8 in
language.asp. This is
REQUIRED, not optional.
Q: Is there any limitations in the software if I mix Western languages and more than one Asian languages?
A: The following are the limitations of the software with regards to mixing Western and Asian languages:
- all server messages (emails sent from the forum software.. e.g. registration email verification) will be encoded in UTF-8. Emails sent in Chinese or Japanese, etc. will not be readable by some email clients.
<message edited by Samuel on Thu. Jul 3, '08 11:21 PM>