Translating To Japanese - Advice Needed

I checked launchpad and there is no support for Japanese language localization. So we will be translating the latest version of OCPortal ourselves. I have read the tutorial page, but as I am new to OCP, I am unsure of how to correctly proceed.

In an earlier translation test, I used the built-in language translation tool, but the Japanese  characters would not display properly.

Should I change the database collation to Japanese language, and if so, which one. There is: cp932_japanese_ci , eucjpms_japanese_ci , sjis_japanese_ci , ujis_japanese_ci , utf8_unicode_ci .

Any advice you can give for a smooth localization process would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
(Of course, we will share the translation files on launchpad when done)

Additional : I have tried adding an RSS news feed from a Japanese news site. Regardless of what character encoding I set my browser to (Firefox, Japanese Shift-JIS/EUC-JP/ISO-2022-JP) the rss news feed would NOT display Japanese characters at all. Is there something I am missing ?

Additional#2: For a test, I have changed the database collation to utf8_unicode_ci, and I have tried translating the file "iotds" (Image of the day) using the built-in translator tools.
I then checked the site and added &keep_lang=JA to the url.
Some of it shows correctly (site), some does not (AdminZone).

If I try to re-edit the iotds file, none of the translated Japanese entries display correctly. 今日のイメージ (today's image) is displaying a string of &#number;&#number;&#number; etc…
How do you fix it so that non-english text displays correctly throughout the site ?

Please let me know if you can help.

Hi,

Japanese should be available on Launchpad:
Japanese (ja) : Translations : Series 6.0 : ocPortal

In an earlier translation test, I used the built-in language translation tool, but the Japanese  characters would not display properly.

If you use Launchpad then export the po's and put them into the ocPortal site, ocPortal will automatically set the character set to utf-8. This is because Launchpad works off utf-8 so ocPortal knows it has to do this.
If working directly in ocPortal, you need to first change the 'charset' language string to 'utf-8' in the language you are using to do the translation (i.e. you must switch to using JA yourself immediately after creating it, or you must switch EN to utf-8).

Is there something I am missing ?

ocPortal will try it's best to convert anything that goes into it to whatever character set it is running. But if that is converting Japanese utf-8 characters to iso-8859-1, it would make a mess of it.



Summary: it's the 'charset' language string that defines the character set, not the database character set. Character sets are always very confusing things. If you don't have the right character set and put in a non-supported character, it will pass it to the server as HTML (the # stuff you saw). Sometimes ocPortal supports HTML in language strings, sometimes it does not.

Hello,

I'm new to ocPortal.  I built a homepage with Silverstripe for my school, but I'm not happy with it.  (Seemed to me that Silverstripe is great for programmers, which I am not.)  

Anyways, I wish to create a site where the backend/admin stuff is in English, but portions of the text and menus the visitors use are in Japanese.

So far I'm not seeing how to do that, mainly since I don't know do to get Japanese text to work.  (Yes UTF-8, but how to switch to it?)  Thanks!