Sister's Computer Randomly Translating Things

LavaKnight

Hey everyone,

I built my sister's computer for her a little while back, so thus it falls to me to be tech support for her.

Besides a problem of not wanting to turn off/restart until the second or third try, the translation thing is really perplexing. We installed the east asian languages pack through the XP disc so she could see Kanji for her japanese class. Now, it seems to be randomly turning characters with umlauts, accents, or whatever into japanese characters. Windows updates are also translated into japanese, which makes it kind of hard to avoid the less desirable updates.

I actually haven't tried playing around in the language settings yet, and I suspect she might have hit some weird option, but since I haven't ever heard of XP randomly translating anything before, I thought I'd get some advice first.

Thanks for your consideration!

blincoln

There should be a little language indicator somewhere on the screen. In XP I believe it's either in the system tray or the task bar. It's off-white and has two capital letters in it. Right now it probably says "JP" or "NH" or something. Set it to "EN" instead.

Reiten

Make sure the default language is English and that on the listing of languages, Japanese is below English.

robaal

Google says the relevant setting is under control panel -> regional and language settings -> advanced -> "language for non-unicode programs" - some apps will check this, IIRC, and display the dialogs in the preferred language and use the appropriate font script.

I don't think the language bar will have an effect on the displayed font...

LavaKnight

robaal wrote:

Google says the relevant setting is under control panel -> regional and language settings -> advanced -> "language for non-unicode programs" - some apps will check this, IIRC, and display the dialogs in the preferred language and use the appropriate font script.

I don't think the language bar will have an effect on the displayed font...

Yeah, I think this is more than likely the problem. She knows how to change the keyboard, and it seems to be random apps that are doing it. I'll go through and check out that non-unicode option.

Thanks for everyone's help. Hopefully this fixes it.

LavaKnight

Hmm, I just went into the language settings and English was set as default under the non-unicode menu.

What it's doing, now that I've seen it, is replacing those afformentioned accented letters with characters in the actual file name, making itunes and other aps show the names as such.

I guess maybe disabling the japanese language option might work, in hopes that it will return to normal letting us re-enable the language afterwards.

Man Windows is awesome. It isn't doing it for every file, either, so it's kind of perplexing.