On Mon, 13 Jun 1994 11:21:42 -0400 P. Divirgilio said:
>they handle this problem? If I want to send a text in Chinese or
>Japanese is "ping-ying" transcript appropriate? I have a program
 
Pying-ying is the de facto standard transliteration for Chinese,
though older transliteration methods might be more politically correct
for a few readers.  Yeah, use pying-ying.
 
Pying-ying has nothing to do with Japanese.  Wade-Giles is the standard,
though a few Japanese have tried unsuccessfully to start a newer standard
in which "Yamaguchi" becomes "Yamaguti."  You can see why it hasn't
caught on.
 
>the receiver? Our site says that MIME is a sort of unofficial standard
 
The only standard is good old ASCII.  Everything else is a headache,
including Finnish, Polish, and other diacriticals.  ASCII is the only
convention that will work across all the platforms on Internet: VM/CMS,
VAX/VMS, Unix, DOS, Macintosh, etc.