Russian characters / translation

[ffutures]

This ought to be Russian characters. Does it look like that to you, and if you happen to speak Russian, what do you think it means?

Конечно это реальное!

I know what two translator programs on different sites say, what I don't know is if it's idiomatic or in a form no real Russian would use.

Additional question - how do I convert that string into HTML character codes?

Comments

[empressvesica.livejournal.com]

Looks lovely. Sadly, my Russian is beyond rusty. Sorry!

[marmot63.livejournal.com]

一定这真正!

[landsmand.livejournal.com]

Transliterated:

"Konechno ehto real'noe"

Roughly - "of course it's a real thing!".

Regards

Henrik

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Thanks - the starting phrase was "of course it's real!" so it seems close enough.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Sorry - belatedly occurs to me that a phonetic approximation might be the way to go; is "Konechno ehto real'noe" reasonably accurate?

[landsmand.livejournal.com]

That's a straight transliteration. Phonetic would be more like:

"Konyetschno ehto reyal'noye"

- which would approximate the pronunciation better.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Many thanks.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

how do I convert that string into HTML character codes?

That depends rather a lot on what you mean by "HTML character codes". To begin with, which HTML version are you using, and which character encoding do you use for your files?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Basically, I want it to look like that in fiction archives, I'm assuming that I need to use character codes, the same as any other non-ASCII character. Snag is I have no idea how the sites it'll be posted to encode characters - I can't even paste it into the text editor I use for HTML, which isn't a good start.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

There are at least two major problems here. The first is which codes to use. Character codes of any kind are just numbers. To make sense of them, there must be an encoding that says which number is supposed to be what character. For English, that's ASCII. For anything else, it gets complicated. Most western European languages get by decently with the ISO-8859-1 encoding (also called Latin-1). For languages using the Cyrillic alphabet, there are several common encodings, none of which are particularly compatible with Latin-1.

Even in old-style HTML, you can use a meta tag to specify how the document is encoded. You could use that along with one of the Russian encodings -- but if you then want a French name with an accent or something in the same document, you lose.

If you use XHTML, it gets a little easier. XHTML is XML, which uses Unicode unless you've specified otherwise. Unicode is meant the be the solution to all the incompatible encodings, at it contains just about every character ever used in any language ever. Here you can simply find out the number for the character you want (probably from http://www.unicode.org/) and put it into the document as an XML character entity: ㋋ (which should be ㋋, or "IDEOGRAPHIC TELEGRAPH SYMBOL FOR DECEMBER").

There's a good chance that that character looked like garbage to you, which leads to the second major problem: the viewer must have a font installed that contains the character, and hir browser must be able to understand the encoding! This is probably not a real problem if you're targetting modern browsers (or MSIE) and something as common as Russian, but it's worth keeping in mind.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Looks like a phoenetic approximation might be a lot simpler - thanks for your help anyway.

[ggreig]

The best place to find the Unicode character code for non-Latin characters - so long as you're only doing it in small amounts - would be The Unicode Home Page. I find the best way to find what I'm looking for is the charts page, but there may be better alternatives as I'm not a heavy user.