deciphering "???"

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Susan Scotto wrote:

 > Greetings, Seelangers -
 >
 > My Russian friends and colleagues tell me that undecipherable
 > Cyrillic on our end is a result of encoding incompatibilities.  To
 > solve this problem, whenever I receive a message in which the
 > Cyrillic comes up as undecipherable, I go to "View" on my taskbar.
 > There, I select "Encoding" and try each of the Cyrillic options until
 > I get the one that corresponds to the encoding of the original
 > message.  On my college account, this works for me most of the time.
 > When it doesn't, I forward the message to my Yahoo account and go
 > through the same procedure until I find the one that corresponds to
 > the sender's encoding (which, I understand, the sender has no way of
 > controlling from his end.)

Yes, mostly these are encoding issues, but usually not
"incompatibilities." I'd rather say "mismatches," because most modern
programs are capable of talking to one another in most any character set.

Each email message normally contains a line in the header specifying the
character set, and if the sender composes a well-formed message but (for
whatever reason) specifies the wrong character set, the recipient will
see gibberish. In most cases, manually overriding the setting at the
receiving end corrects the problem. One of my favorite features in
Netscape 7 is that if I compose a message containing characters not in
the character set I've selected, it will prompt me to correct the
problem when I try to send (you wouldn't believe how often I try to send
Russian messages in Western encoding and am saved by the program).
However, if all you see are question marks, the message has been
irrecoverably damaged by deletion of one bit from every character.

You can see the same kind of thing with web pages sometimes, and many
Russian sites simply don't bother to specify what character set to use
(isn't it obvious? doesn't everyone use Windows 1251?). In such cases,
the browser will make an educated guess, sometimes with hilarious
results -- my Netscape 7 seems to follow a policy of "when in doubt,
assume it's Japanese." Once again, manually selecting the correct
encoding works.

But the problem we were discussing relates to programs like Qualcomm
Eudora, which simply do not support Cyrillic. In fact, on the
recommendation of non-Russophile friends who were simply ecstatic with
the program's features, I actually wasted $40 on that program a few
years back, only to find that it was useless for my purposes. Sometimes
if you're very clever you can trick these programs into behaving a
little for a short period, but if you send and receive Cyrillic
regularly, it quickly becomes a huge waste of time to fight the program.
Just get one that does the job and you'll find your life is a thousand
percent smoother.

--
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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