I am having some problems with an email containing Japanese characters sent to my Hotmail account.
My computer is running a United States version of Windows XP but I have added the Japanese expansion pack (or whatever they call it). Also the Hotmail account is on the United States version of Hotmail (Hotmail.com).
After I added the Windows Japanese language pack I have been able to cut and paste Japanese characters from Japanese web pages into MS Word, Alta Vista Babelfish translator, and I have been able to send things I translated on Babelfish (from Eng to Japanese) as actual Japanese characters in the subject line and body of Hotmail emails.
But when someone sends me an email with Japanese in it it comes out all garbled like this:
How can I remedy this problem? And is it possible to have the above gibberish somehow “translated” to Japanese?
You might need to change your browser character encoding. There are at least two incompatible encoding schemes for Japanese text: EUC and JIS. Your browser might be detecting the page as ASCII or Unicode-encoded and thus not decoding the Japanese correctly. In Firefox, you can change character encodings under the View menu, in Character Encodings. I’m not sure about IE, but it’s probably similar.
Try carterba’s suggestion first. Your browser probably has a “Japanese - Automatic” setting, but you can also set it manually to one of three encodings.
But I’ve had inconsistent results with English web-based mail. In the long run it’s better to use a Japanese-capable web mail. Yahoo! Japan has a free e-mail service, and Gmail has good Japanese support as well.