Viewing and editing non-unicode in ArcGIS

[hariasa]

I have a shapefile with Chinese characters in it. When I edit the shapefile and put an english translation, the chinese characters dissappear because of the encoding my system uses. 

 

I could change the system locale, but this is to me a last resort. Is there a way to force ArcGIS to read things in a certain encoding? (for example messing with the DBF header?)

 

QGIS demonstrates how it is done; it just accepts CPG files.

 

Thanks!

[marahimi]

http://support.esri.com/es/knowledgebase/techarticles/detail/21106

[rahmansunbeam]

I had a similar experience once. My odesk client wanted to do something out of a Hebrew shape file. Try these,

 

- add Chinese as secondary system language at your os. This will add a language changer app to the status bar. Use google translate to do the rest.

- there is another technique to change attribute table character encoding format I forgot.    

[hariasa]

http://support.esri.com/es/knowledgebase/techarticles/detail/21106

This solution does not work. I have added the registry key with the Chinese Simplified codepage (936), and when saving the shapefile after editing all chinese characters revert to gobbledygook.

 

 

I had a similar experience once. My odesk client wanted to do something out of a Hebrew shape file. Try these,

 

- add Chinese as secondary system language at your os. This will add a language changer app to the status bar. Use google translate to do the rest.

- there is another technique to change attribute table character encoding format I forgot.    

 

Step 1: Did not work for me, same issues as above, all characters after editing revert to nonsense. 

 

Step 2: Sounds interesting! Hopefully it will get back to you because this issue is really annoying. Why doesn't ArcGIS simply accept CPG files???

 

Thanks for helping though, if you or anyone else has more ideas, let me know

 

P.S.: by the way, to translate a DBF from a shapefile more efficiently, open in OpenOffice, select appropriate Codepage, Save as XLS format, upload to Google Documents, make a new column in Google spreadsheets, apply a formula such as =GoogleTranslate(<cell-to-be-translated>,"de","en") and drag down, download as XLS format, save as DBF format replacing your existing DBF file. Note that the column name should be of the same format as the other column names or it won't work! (Do this with open office because Excel does not allow codepages to be set). Long procedure, but if you have like 50.000 entries it's much faster than translating every single one of them manually...

[rahmansunbeam]

hmm. Try setting Chinese as primary os language. I hope you have AG language pack installed.