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| Tip of the Month: Why Email Messages Sometime Appear to be Written in an Alien Language, and How to Translate Foreign Web Sites |
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Occasionally an email message will arrive that appears to be written in
characters not of this planet. While such messages may just be another serving
of spam, they may also be useful information. Here's why they show up that
way and what you can do to make sense of it.
A message from Japan that began: ‚R‚W-¼-lŒÀ'è?¡‰ñ'-ot‚³‚¹‚Ä'¸‚"‚Ü‚µ‚½?B"Ë'R‚Ì"z?M?A?½‚ÉŽ¸-ç‚¢‚ prompted this response from Zach Radding of the Computer Infrastructure Technology Group: The English language is made up of the regular A to Z characters plus numbers and a few symbols, but computers only talk 1s and 0s. So, in order to make the 1s and 0s make sense, we have a code that decodes certain patterns of 1s and 0s into the standard characters (it's called ASCII). For Japan and other countries that don't use our alphabet, they map the same 1's and 0's to their character set. The "alien" characters that you see are the result of our email client trying to use ASCII to display data that was supposed to be in Japanese. If you want to read the web page of the originating organization (in this case, sb88.com, go to http://babelfish.altavista.com/. Copy the web address into the box labeled Web Page, then choose translate from Japanese to English. |
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