I'm going to be converting one of our sites into chinese (I'm not doing the translation) and any suggestions of how to make this as painless as possible will be much appreciated. Converting to the Turkish language was a huge pain and I'm wondering how hard chinese is going to be...
Will, Great avatar dude. Turkish was a PITA! I was unable to get the Turkish language tools to load and work under my version of W2Kpro, so I had to convert all non-western characters into their Unicode equivalents. If you visit www.mocap-turkey.com, and view the source, you'll see a boat load of Unicode. For whatever reason, with the Turkish language pack installed on my pc, I could type the characters, but then I would save the file, the special characters were converted to the western character set. So there was a ton of search and replace to make the site view properly in the browser. I still don't know what effect it has on search engine performance.
it should display in Chinese OS with no problems. For windows with English OS, you just need to install the cjk language pack (not sure if this is the proper name) under Regional and Language options. The user will be prompted anyway if it is not installed. One word of warning though if you don't know the language, be very careful when you edit pages with chinese chars, if you accidentally delete half a char (cos of being double bytes), the rest of the text will be jibberish.
Thanks for the info. I will not be doing any edits, just cut & paste of a supplied translation. Thanks again.