I'm trying to get a rather simple application to work, and maybe somebody with previous experience in getting foreign-language characters to render correctly could point me to what I need to get it right. My straightforward and apparently underinformed attempts have not worked, and reading the obvious bits of the obvious API's has not gotten it to wor either.

The problem: a vocabulary trainer that reads XML containing a list of items in one language associated with their translation equivalents in another language. The languages in question could be Spanish from English, but they could also be Arabic from Chinese. A selection of items is displayed in two lists. So in the most severe case, you've got Arabic displaying in one list and Chinese displaying in the other.

I'm using Java 1.4.2 and Swing, and I don't think I'm having any difficulty producing clean UTF-8 files for the XML source data. (Although I don't think I have a trusted way to validate the UTF-8 encoding.)

Thanks!