Character & ASCII question

Can someone point me to a site that explains the use of characters in other languages?

I need to place text in other language, on an English-speaker site.

Thanks in advance

 

the worst situation that can happen to you is if you still live with ASCII charset encoding

the best situation would be a clean UTF-8
that however requires a clean install and configuration of ALL involved components,
i.e.
all your offline tools/editors and best even your desktop environment
as well as file system and remote server config are clean UTF-8
then in most cases you have zero problems with multilingual pages at all - whatever your keyboard can type - can be displayed on a properly configured local and remote system if all is UTF-8.

in extreme multilingual mixed pages you use unicode for foreign language texts if text quantity is small
in larger text components it might be easier to SSI foreign language text modules either using iframes or regular SSI with the included text module being properly configured for that language.

myself i have multilingual pages - you forgot to mention what foreign language you plan to co-use on your english pages.

i have foreign language pages and mixed language pages - the latter i use unicode for cyrilic text and regular UTF-8 for latin1 ( western EU / southern EU languages )

many years ago when i implemented the multilingual pages - I spent weeks to study the situation and part of those study was to look how the "big ones" solve such problems ...
by that time the larger SEs used to insert foreign language texts quiet often with GIF graphics of the texts.

since you missed to mention the languages :
for latin1 languages if used frequently it might be best to get a european keyboard that has all foreign characters by default - for example a keyboard de-CH has all FR/DE/IT/ES/PT characters in addition to regular EN characters.
a Google search for something like
multilingual pages html

may help you further

keep in mind that proper display in a foreign browser may be eased by using proper language tags in HTML
such tags as
HTML
P
DIV
as well as meta tags in general
help to guide the browser to the correct interpretation of the text.
above G search will help you to study and find your solution

 

Thank you so much for elaborating.
I couldn't ask for more!
Great answer!
Thanks!!!