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.