Great article - thanks! Unfortunately I still can't figure out why I'm getting weird characters in my non-english text output. I've set apache default encoding to utf-8, and indicated utf-8 encoding in both the HTTP headers as well as META head. The characters look fine when I see them in my logs and in the database table for languages (also utf-8), but in the browser there are question marks for all the non-ANSI chars. argh!