Make Windows correctly display characters from languages other than English (set non-Unicode programs)

Do you use Windows in English, and run apps, files and multimedia files in other languages with different characters? Have you ever had problems with apps or content written in languages which use different characters from those found in English? Languages like Spanish, German, Polish, Arabic, Russian, Romanian or Hebrew? If you do, then you should read this article and understand how to make Windows correctly display characters from other languages:

Contents

What is Unicode and why does it matter?
The most common problem: movie subtitles do not correctly display some characters
How to set the language for non-Unicode programs in Windows
Conclusion

NOTE: This guide applies to all versions of Windows. Please read the theoretical chapters first, not just the practical ones, so that you have a good understanding of this topic.

What is Unicode and why does it matter?

First, let's talk about Unicode and what it is. Understanding it means that you know how Windows displays special characters like ῦ, Ᾰ, and many others, from different languages.

Unicode is a character encoding standard, developed by the Unicode Consortium, which defines a set of letters, numbers, and symbols that represent almost all of the written languages in the world. Its success in unifying character sets has led to widespread use in the creation of software.

Where does Unicode come in? When you talk about software being written in a language with a specific character set (e.g., Chinese), that is expected to run and be displayed correctly on a computer with an operating system which uses a different character set (e.g., Windows in English). The opposite situation applies just as well: software written in English, which uses Latin characters, expected to run and be displayed correctly on a Windows computer in Chinese. In such instances, depending on how the application was coded, not all the characters in the interface of the app may be displayed correctly.

Complications happen when you need to use software and operating systems that have "conflicting" character sets. For example, an app is in Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, while the operating system uses Latin characters, such as English, Spanish, German, Romanian, and so on.

When such conflicts occur, the display language used by the operating system is considered to be the Unicode language and the program being run (with a different character set), as non-Unicode. By default, non-Unicode programs are set in Windows to use the same language as the operating system. Since the program uses a completely different character set from the one used by the default non-Unicode program language, it is not displayed correctly. To fix the problem, you need to change the default language used by Windows for non-Unicode programs to match the one used by the application you want to run.

Below, you can see an example of such a conflict, and how some characters were displayed before changing the non-Unicode programs language in Windows, and after it was modified to the correct language.