Dear wwwsift members,

I have just become aware of an encoding problem with the Altavista
search interfaces at www.multilingual.ch (for finding both glossaries
and parallel texts), which results in an AV server error and zero
results.

AV seems to have a problem converting special characters (e.g. German
letters with umlauts: ä, ö, ü) all of a sudden.
I am looking into it and will try and put things right as soon as
possible. This problem does not affect the AV glossary search
interfaces in languages that do not use such characters (e.g. EN
glossary search interface) or AV search interfaces where the source
language is a language that does not use such characters (e.g. EN>DE
parallel text search interface).

I have noticed that searching for "wörterbuch" and "worterbuch", for
example, now strangely yields the same number of results. That may be
the way to go...

In the meantime, please bear with me.

If anyone has any useful information or ideas that might help me put
things right again, I would be grateful to hear from you.

Many thanks,

Tanya Harvey Ciampi
http://www.multilingual.ch
WWW Search Interfaces for Translators