iBook / Chinese Characters

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Level 1

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iBook / Chinese Characters

I have been writing to a pen pal in China, who does not speak English. On their end, they have been having a person translate from English to Chinese and their reply back to English. The translation cost is getting expensive for them.

I have used Altavista Bablefish to translate my English email to Chinese. The translation works, I can cut and paste it to my email. But on sending the email
the only thing received in China is garbage characters.

Is there some setting on Mac, iBook G4 with 10.4.11 that needs to be changed to allow actual transmission in emails of the Chinese Character set. I am using Firefox and Thunderbird.

I goal is to be able to write my text in English, translate with Bablefish to Chinese and send it. Then my friend in China just simply send the return email in Chinese and i will use Bablefish to translate back to English.

Thanks for your help.

Paul

PowerMac G4, Mac OS X (10.4.11)

Posted on Oct 22, 2008 7:07 AM

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Answer 1

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,240 points

Oct 22, 2008 7:48 AM in response to wm300

But on sending the email
the only thing received in China is garbage characters.... I am using Firefox and Thunderbird.

You need to have the encoding correct. I would recommend a real mail app like Mail or Thunderbird rather than web mail, which can be unreliable. In Mail you would go to Message > Text Encoding and select GB 2312 or Big 5, depending on whether you are doing Simplified or Traditional Chinese. There should be something similar in Thunderbird.

Machine translation via something like Babelfish can easily produce total nonsense or embarrassing results, so hopefully you have some way of knowing that is not happening in your case.

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Answer 2

wm300 Author

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Oct 22, 2008 8:20 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

Tom, Thank You !
After work tonight, I will do as you suggest and give it a try. I will post results.

Paul

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Answer 3

wm300 Author

Level 1

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Oct 22, 2008 8:40 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

Hi Tom;

I just tried as you suggested and it works. I sent myself a email using GB2312 encoding, received it and used Babblefish to get a reasonable translation. Wow, Thank You.

Ihave always used Western ISO-8859-1 encoding which was default when I loaded Thunderbird. What will happen if I just use the GB 2312 as default encoding for all email. I did send myself a test using the GB 2312 encoding and it seems fine.

Thanks for your continued help.

Paul

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Answer 4

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,240 points

Oct 22, 2008 9:02 AM in response to wm300

Ihave always used Western ISO-8859-1 encoding which was default when I loaded Thunderbird. What will happen if I just use the GB 2312 as default encoding for all email.

I don't think that will cause you any problems. If it does, you can set it back.

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Answer 5

wm300 Author

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Oct 22, 2008 9:06 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

Tom, Thank you !

This solves my problem. Translation is not perfect as we know, but if my emails are worded right the translation is usuable.

Paul

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Answer 6

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,240 points

Oct 22, 2008 9:18 AM in response to wm300

This solves my problem.

I forgot to mention, that default setting in Thunderbird might only be for incomings, so you might not be able to rely upon it for your outgoings. You will need to check that via experiment.

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Answer 7

wm300 Author

Level 1

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Oct 22, 2008 12:17 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

Tom;

I checked both the outgoing and incoming email via tests to myself on a different userid. They all work fine. I have done quite a few emails since your suggestion and my change of encoding to GB2312. I blind copied myself on all. The outgoing email font changed a tad, but its just fine. I believe with high confidence that I am good to go, thanks to you.

And thanks to Apple for this wonderful resource !!

Paul

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