[thelist] Chinese language site

[Susan Wallace]

Michael,

I am not sure how much this will help you, but this is my experience with 
International web sites. (Circa 1997-8?)

If you are on a Windows (95 or 98, I don't know about NT/2000/ME etc) 
machine, in the Control Panel, choose Keyboard. There is a tab that says 
"Language". From that screen, you can add additional languages to your 
system. There is a check box on that screen that says "Enable indicator on 
task bar" which puts a small icon in your tray that represents the flag of 
the country whose language is currently active. (i.e. if it's the American 
Flag, and you have a standard QWERTY keyboard, that is the character set 
that you will type in.) This allows you to switch between different 
Character sets to type within programs on your system that support 
International Languages. I know that this works within most MSFT products, 
and if I remember correctly, we used it within Adobe Photoshop too. This is 
a system technology rather than a browser technology. (This was also 
available for Mac, but I don't work with them often enough to outline the 
steps here...)

However, just because you have that enabled on your system does not 
necessarily mean that you are  able to view other character sets in your 
browser. When I worked directly with this, I had to install the 
International Language pack from MSFT, which I *believe* installed the 
fonts I needed to view the work on the screen.

In addition, in order to have a web page that you create in another 
language display in that character set on the screen, in the header of the 
page, you need to replace:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

with:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; 
charset=ISO-Unicode-IBM-1264">


(Or whatever language you are using)

There are specs and different preferred character sets listed here:
http://www.w3.org/International/

Like I mentioned, this was a long time ago and I am sure lots of changes 
have been made to this process. I hope this helps you at least a little.

>3) My client has a translator, but how will he suppply me text content? Are
>there applications that he uses to edit text that will export ASCII?

The way that we handled this situation was to have the translators work 
with an International version of MSFT Word, and then we were able to 
copy/paste and even export to our HTML pages. (Again, this was a long time 
ago, but I believe that ASCII is still ASCII) ;-)

>5) Am I crazy to bid on this site based on the above?

I don't think so, but it will definitely be a learning experience. :) The 
one thing I usually caution people on is not falling into the trap of 
believing that a computer translator is 100% accurate. In the tests I have 
conducted through http://www.freetranslation.com/ and 
http://babelfish.altavista.com/ using (Castilian) Spanish and Portuguese, I 
have found them to be about 80 - 90% accurate, but the biggest caveat is 
with industry specific terms. You need to have access to someone who 
understands the business you are translating for, and can go through the 
documents you may translate with a computer program and clean them up. For 
example, the word "can" in Spanish was translated the same in these instances:

"Can someone help me with this problem?"
"I need to purchase a 2 quart oil can."

I have found that it was Ok with the translators (humans) to have me 
provide them with a "raw" translation and then have them clean it up, but 
they don't mind re-keying the information either. I believe that if you 
hire a translation company to do this for you, they charge by the word.

Perhaps someone else will be able to clarify this for you, but I think it's 
at least a good place to start. I don't think that I have given you false 
information, it just may be old.

Good luck!
Susan