Site Translation Arabic

[J. Codling]

I have a client that wishes their site be translated into an Arabic version.
They have spent considerable time and energy getting it translated and now I
have a MS word doc with the arabic text that they wish to be inserted.

I use DW MX 2004. I can open the existing page and copy the new Arabic text
into the appropriate spots but when I save the file it turns the Arabic into
a bunch of '?'s. How can I get it to save the Arabic text the way it is
supposed to be encoded? It shows up on the screen ok until I close it and if
I open it, it is ?'s again. I have installed the Arabic languange pack and
also set the page to be encoded in windows-1256 which I think is the
appropriate font. In DW it displays it as Arabic but it won't save it that
way...

Any suggestions?

 

[rf]

J. Codling

[Aabic]

Any suggestions?

It's nothing to do with Word. You need to install Arabic language support in
Windows.

Open up control panel>Regional and Language settings>Details and go from
there.

This of course implies you are running windows XP, or at least 2000. 9x is a
totally different matter, you have to obtain an Arabic version of this,
which you probably cannot now.

 

[Jim Higson]

I have a client that wishes their site be translated into an Arabic
version. They have spent considerable time and energy getting it
translated and now I have a MS word doc with the arabic text that they
wish to be inserted.

I use DW MX 2004. I can open the existing page and copy the new Arabic
text into the appropriate spots but when I save the file it turns the
Arabic into a bunch of '?'s. How can I get it to save the Arabic text the
way it is supposed to be encoded? It shows up on the screen ok until I
close it and if I open it, it is ?'s again. I have installed the Arabic
languange pack and also set the page to be encoded in windows-1256 which I
think is the appropriate font. In DW it displays it as Arabic but it won't
save it that way...

Might I suggest a different approach...

It seems to me that if you don't understand Arabic it's going to take a long
time and it'd be pretty frustrating to copy and paste a load of text from
the word processing doc into a WYSIWYG editor.

Maybe you could put up some kind of CMS, with a simple (wiki-like?) sytax
that the translator enters themselves, and is transformed into HTML by a
script; you could get by never touching Arabic.

IMO assembling multi-lingual pages should is best done by the computer.

Eitherway, I recoment keeping everything in utf8, because it can represent
(almost) any language and will hardly be any bigger for most files (Arabic
is in the first 1900 or so chars, which use 2 bytes each)
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF8 for more info.

 

[J. Codling]

J. Codling

[Aabic]

Any suggestions?

It's nothing to do with Word. You need to install Arabic language support
in
Windows.

Open up control panel>Regional and Language settings>Details and go from
there.

This of course implies you are running windows XP, or at least 2000. 9x is
a
totally different matter, you have to obtain an Arabic version of this,
which you probably cannot now.

Already done that... Thanks for the suggestion though.

 

[J. Codling]

"J. Codling" <jcodling-AT-jcodling-DOT-com> wrote:
[snipity snip snip]
Might I suggest a different approach...

It seems to me that if you don't understand Arabic it's going to take a
long
time and it'd be pretty frustrating to copy and paste a load of text from
the word processing doc into a WYSIWYG editor.

Yes it is. I figured out how to get that far but now some of the text gets
messed up in the process. Frustrating...

Maybe you could put up some kind of CMS, with a simple (wiki-like?) sytax
that the translator enters themselves, and is transformed into HTML by a
script; you could get by never touching Arabic.

The translator was hired by my client and not by me. If it was done by me it
would already be in the HTML page.

I use PHP and all the pages are in seperate files that are actually easy to
edit.

IMO assembling multi-lingual pages should is best done by the computer.

If I could get my computer to create it then I would be making way more
money than I am now.

Eitherway, I recoment keeping everything in utf8, because it can represent
(almost) any language and will hardly be any bigger for most files (Arabic
is in the first 1900 or so chars, which use 2 bytes each)
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF8 for more info.

Yes, UTF-8 is what I am doing the pages in now. Of course IE doesn't listen
to the meta tag that says what it is encoded in... Stupid Micro$oft...