Proper display of foreign language (traditional Chinese) using Stata 14

[Man Yang]

Hi folks, I am working on a dataset that contains traditional Chinese characters in it. Below is my syntax in order to let Stata properly show the data:

unicode encoding set "GB18030"

unicode translate data.dta, invalid(mark) transutf8

However, the data still contains unrecognizable Chinese characters, which I don't know why. It seems the people were able to get Chinese properly displayed after using the syntax but apparently, mine is not the case here. Any clues for me please? Thanks.

[Jason ZY Liu]

clear
unicode analyze ##.dta
unicode encoding set gb18030
unicode retranslate ##.dta, invalid(mark) transutf8
use ##,clear

[Hua Peng (StataCorp)]

GB18030 is encoding for simplified Chinese. Try "windows-950-2000" for traditional Chinese. Since the dataset was already translated with the wrong encoding, you must restore the dataset to its original form first.

 clear
unicode restore data.dta

Then you may

clear
unicode encoding set windows-950-2000
 unicode translate data.dta

Carefully read -help unicode_translate- will help.