Avoid Strange Characters in JTrans Pro Translated pages

Most Joomla! sites will render the non-English characters correctly. However, some Joomla installations need some tweaking to allow this. This issue especially applies with translations to French, Greek, Russian, Japanese, Chinese and Arabic languages.

If this is happening ONLY for Asian languages and only on your PC, the problem is with your PC. It cannot handle these fonts. Please install the Asian fonts. If all the above languages are affected and this is consistent on many PC terminals or is also seen on Windows Vista (which has Asian fonts installed by default), please read on.

To make your Joomla files UTF-8 compliant, please follow these instructions (we assume your database is already compliant. If not, look at the bottom box.):

Please make backups of all 3 files mentioned below!

STEP 1. Open the file globals.php and at the end of it, right after the last

}

and right before

?>

put the following code:

header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8");

STEP 2. Open the file language/english.php and go on line 421. Change the following code from:

DEFINE('_ISO','charset=iso-8859-1');

to:

DEFINE('_ISO','charset=UTF-8');

STEP 3. Open the file includes/database.php and change the following code from:

//        @mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'", $this->_resource);

        @mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'", $this->_resource);

THE END.

Now, save all the files and check the translations, they should be working fine.  

How to make your database also UTF-8 compliant?
If you are creating a new site, create your database manually and go to operations, and there set the collation of the database as utf8_general_ci. However, if you have already installed Joomla, this is quite complicated and you may request our technical staff for assistance.