When your English-language website becomes multilingual using a DBCS such as Japanese, Chinese, or Korean, you may find problems displaying characters properly.

When a DBCS is encoded in programming, each character is given a unique number. The problem is that several different encoding methods may be used in this process. Which encoding is selected usually depends on the system in which the language is processed and the connectivity with other systems, making frequent code conversion necessary. A Japanese-language website developed using Java, for example, uses Shift JIS for display, Unicode for internal processing, and EUC-JP for storing data in databases. Encoding is often modified to display special characters and symbols, such as ②, ㈱, and 〒.

How these encoding problems are solved depends on the experience of programmers and web designers, most of whom handle English websites and have little experience with such problems. Simply translating English text and replacing it with the target language is not enough!