Using Content Written in Other Languages or Created in a Non-UTF-8 Environment

Note: If your course content was created in a UTF-8 environment, you do not need to use this feature.

WebCT supports the UTF-8 character set, which represents characters from modern languages, including Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Russian, and Turkish. The UTF-8 character set is a form of Unicode. Unicode is a character set that can handle over 65,000 character combinations and can represent most of the world's languages.

WebCT's Convert Character Set feature is available in all UTF-8 courses and allows you to use course content that is:

• written in a language that is different from the language of your WebCT course. For example, if you are teaching an English literature course and your class is studying a text that was translated from Russian, you can display an excerpt from the text in its original Russian.
• created in a non-UTF-8 environment. For example, in your Japanese WebCT course, you can display content that was originally created in either a Japanese (Shift_JIS) or Japanese (EUC-JP) environment.

For a complete list of the character sets that can be converted to the UTF-8 character set, see the drop-down list on the Convert Character Set screen in Manage Files.

Anyone who wants to use content created in different character sets can benefit from the Convert Character Set feature, including:

• language instructors
• multilingual educational institutions
• multilingual students

For instructions on using this feature, see Convert Character Set.