Category: Unicode in large scale networks:

How to use Unicode to Simplify Multilingual Content Management:
How things go wrong when the translations were perfectly correct?

Web presentation of multilingual content, as we know, is much more than simply translating the content to the desired language. There are cultural issues, context issues, and concepts that do not translate easily.

However, even if all these are done correctly, there are significant technical issues that are sometimes referred to as "transcoding" issues. Since there are multiple encoding standards, and these standards are not uniformly implemented even between applications on the same computer!

This presentation describes the process by which multiple applications handle multilingual data in a content management scenario. It illustrates the data transformations that cause problems with the data (transcoding). It then describes how much simpler the workflow becomes when Unicode is implemented correctly.

Finally, some concrete examples of real cases where the process has gone well and where it has failed, due to failure to use Unicode correctly throughout the process or failure to follow the fundamental principle of "Globalization First; Localization Second.