hiccup with Smarty 
Well I jave my japanese file loaded and the page runs. Few problems though. The translation strings for the error messages (use cnb’s myGettext on those) are working fine in English and Japanese. The problem is in the IntSmarty or Smarty. I personally think it is the Smarty. Ok here goes my theory - IntSmarty does its job and gets the string conversion in the alternate language and passes it to the Smarty to put into the template. Smarty however doesn’t know what to do with the multibyte strings or how to display them, so I get the wonderful ???? strings.
Sent an email to coogle (John Coogeshall - the creator of IntSmarty) telling him of my problem and my opinion of what and where the problem is. He very quickly got back to me that he would take a look. And today he sent me another email saying that he thinks there is a “problem with multibyte support” and is taking a closer look. Man I really wish I knew Smarty and how it works. Will be taking a look at it’s code when I get back to work and see if I can pinpoint the problem since coogle does have another job (Congrats by the way and I hope you enjoy your new job at Zend) that has nothing to do with me and my problems ( 
). More minds working the better. Will keep you posted.
Oh and I am just about ready to load the index page and all it’s templates on to the server and start debugging that page. Want to first get it working in English. Maybe by then I will have a solution for the problem I am having with the multibyte strings. The index page is much more complex then the login screen so I am sure I will having a couple of new problems. 
And one more shout out to coogle - Thank you for your help with solving this problem. I know you are very busy, so I really appreciate you taking the time to help.