Standard Romanian Characters vs. MS Legacy Romanian Characters
I decided to post this after I noticed that the issue of the Romanian standard characters generates misunderstandings. I hope this will be especially useful to clients and project managers who don’t understand Romanian, but who require translation services into Romanian. There are two characters which seem to be problematic: Șș and Țț (and for a good reason).
Up until Windows Vista, Microsoft had used the wrong diacritical signs for the Romanian characters ‘ș’ and ‘ț’. More precisely, instead of complying with the Romanian standard SR 13411:1999 and the international standard ISO/IEC 8859‑16:2001 (Latin10) which provide that a comma should be added underneath the letters ‘s’ and ‘t’ (Unicode codes: U0218 – S with comma, U0219 – s with comma, U021A – T with comma and U021B – t with comma), they complied with the international standard SO/IEC 8859‑2:1998 (Latin2) according to which a cedilla is added underneath the characters ‘s’ and ‘t’ (Unicode codes: U015E – S with cedilla, U015F – s with cedilla, U0162 – T with cedilla and U0163 – t with cedilla).
If the software or OS you are using is not compatible with the standard coding, you will see little empty boxes for each occurrence of these characters. This problem has prompted many of the PMs I am working with to assume that the characters are corrupted and asked me to revert them to the ”Legacy characters”. Even though the difference between the characters may seem insignificant, I think that standard characters should be used whenever possible (this entails updating to Windows Vista or Windows 7 or to install the Romanian Interface Pack for Windows XP Professional).
For Romanian readers I recommend the following article (which also served as a source for this post – Thank you!):
http://www.secarica.ro/html/s-uri_si_t-uri.html
