Unknown said:

When I open one translated Studio file she sent me in Notepad++, the first line has "UTF-8" encoding

I'm wondering if by this you refer to actual physical encoding, or just to the encoding declaration... i.e. to something similar to this:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

or this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

I can't really imagine a file coming from Studio and having content in two different encodings... which is what your post suggests.

Unknown said:

Can you tell me the steps for "adding Byte-Order-Mark (BOM) to the source HTML files"?

It depends on your technical skills... you can e.g. write a script and do it for thousands of files within a second.

Hi Evzen,

As I mentioned in my post, this is an issue my colleague has.  I rarely handle html files in my work, so please forgive me if I didn't phrase my question correctly:)

Here are two screenshots that might explain the encoding better.  I got these screenshots off from Notepad++.  The bilingual Studio file has utf-8 in the first line and at bottom right.  The target file (using generate target translations under batch tasks) has GB2312 (Simplified).  

I am basically looking for ways to tell Studio not to change the encoding to GB2312 when it generates the target files.  Mindy's method is one possible solution, but if there is another way to prevent the issue, I would love to know it!

Chunyi

Well, what to say...
As I presumed, looking at your screenshots and the (basically incorrect) conclusions you are making from what you think it means, you are simply mixing apples and oranges...

The "utf-8" string in the XML declaration element means absolutely nothing in this context... Plus, checking the SDLXLIFF internal encoding is simply complete nonsense in this context.

Unknown said:

I am basically looking for ways to tell Studio not to change the encoding to GB2312 when it generates the target files.  Mindy's method is one possible solution, but if there is another way to prevent the issue, I would love to know it!

There is pretty-well-hidden - and I actually believe that it's probably also somehow forgotten by the developers themselves - Active Document Settings dialog in Editor - go to the Advanced tab and you will find it in the File Actions ribbon group.
If you virtually merge more files, you can set the encodings for all of them. But unfortunately not for all at once, but only one-by-one in a terribly small and non-resizable control (I wish the person who designed this has to do this for 100 files at least twice a day... to taste personally the design's stupidity :-\).

So, the only sensible solution right now is to prepare the source files appropriately before putting them to Studio, i.e. to make sure that they have the UTF-8 BOM.

And we can only hope that future Studio versions will finally implement smarter encoding processing, e.g. like was discussed here (page 2-3): community.sdl.com/.../14067