Here's a tough one:
I'm working on a website where most of the content is in Japanese.
But consider this url:
http://www.stackoverflow.com/質問/日本語のURLはどうする
Most URL parsers, including stackoverflow's, don't know where to delimit URLs that contain Japanese. Not good.
I haven't checked with other browsers yet, but Google Chrome will display URL-decoded Japanese urls in Japanese -- and when you copy the url, it URL-encodes it:
http://www.stackoverflow.com/%E8%B3%AA%E5%95%8F/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E8%AA%9E%E3%81%AEURL%E3%81%AF%E3%81%A9%E3%81%86%E3%81%99%E3%82%8B
That's the right thing to do, but it's not exactly the most friendly. So, I thought, I'd have the content providers just type in short English slugs, like this:
http://www.stackoverflow.com/questions/what-to-do-with-japanese-urls
Awesome. But there's two problems with this:
Any thoughts on the best course of action? :D
The big Japanese websites seem to be somewhat divided on this question. Japanese wikipedia and amazon.co.jp use encoded Japanese, for instance. But the English slugs seem to be the most common. Take a look at http://fujifilm.jp/ for an example.
I think your concern about search engines is pretty valid though, and in your position that might be enough to tip the balance in favor of using encoded Japanese for me. It would be a bit of a pain though- lots of opportunity for error there.
Also, as Mike points out, what stackoverflow is doing is pretty much the right thing, as the url needs to be encoded.
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