Languages

[Paolo]

Have a look at this pic:

http://www.ironspeed.com/Designer/4.3.0 ... age057.jpg

That should give you an idea.

[StefanIsMe (imported)]

Jesus, about the Japanese thing...

I had to do something to send something around at work that was a long jjapanese document.

I know the story area probably cannot hold a picture, but what I did was this;

Using Irfanview, my fave image/multi viewer, I opened the website that had the japanese characters (this works as long as YOUR machine can show japanese chars), then saved the whole kaboodle as a 200dpi Jpeg.

This gives you a long (scrolling) image in jpeg format that anybody can see.

Probably won't help, but..

[Hildy_ (imported)]

Since this is practically my line of work, I thought I could be of help.

The character set, used by the webbrowser to determine which character-shape ("glyph") is used for which character-code, is currently left unspecified on story pages. This makes webbrowsers activate their "auto-detection" logic, which looks at the actual character-codes it encounters and guesses which character set is most likely to display the page as the author intended.

However, as you might've noticed it doesn't always guess right, and that's where explicitly setting the character set to be used comes in. The technically nicest way is to add this as a HTTP header, but that might not be possible for you. Another way is to add the following meta tag to the head section of the html document:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

This indicates to the webbrowser that the universal UTF-8 character set, which allows for encoding of all existing character-shapes, is to be used for the document. If you have a document that uses another character set, figure out its name and fill it in in the place of "utf-8" in the above string. For example, for a japanese document encoded as Shift JIS you should specify:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=Shift_JIS">

However, the easiest is probably to use UTF-8 on every document and have your your text editor save everything as UTF-8. Every self-respecting text editor should have functionality for that, since even Notepad can do that.

Oh yeah, and one more nitpick: the main page (http://www.eunuch.org/main/)'s character set is declared to be iso-8859-1, which makes it mangle certain non-english story titles. Maybe set this to UTF-8 as well?

Anyway, hope this helps.

[plix (imported)]

Up until now, I have been simply automatically publishing stories in foreign languages and assuming they are approrpiate for the site and meet the guidelines without so much as a translation. However, I have never been comfortable with it.

Unfortunately, even with my discomfort over the idea, I do not know what else to do. So I thought I would post and attempt to get some suggestions from others.

One option would be to not accept stories in languages other than English and German. However, neither IE nor I would be comfortable with that option.

Another is to use a translation program. But the problem is those are rarely accurate, and that tells me nothing of whether the story is gramatically approrpiate in its original language.

Yet another would be to attempt to find editors who speak the languages we commonly receive stories in. The problem here is trust. Would we be able to trust these editors?

So, I am open to ideas. Feel free to share