Language selection for blog doesn't exist?

Question

I've been installing and developing on Wordpress for a while with a focus on sites in Hebrew. Recently I moved a site from a multi-site installation I have for development to it's own hosting and domain (in the MU environment I used a third level domain for access). I used BackupBuddy to export and ImportBuddy to install in the new location.

two different (but possibly related which is why I am combining them to a single question) appeared.

1. In the Settings->General in area there is no language selection dropdown, even when I add the Hebrew language files and check that the wp-config.php has the line:

define ('WPLANG', 'he_IL');

See also screenshot at http://screencast.com/t/9KgtF7e2v0

1. Hebrew text that was hardcoded into some of the templates (such as footer.php) is renderd as question marks ??? ??? instead of proper Hebrew glyphs while the Hebrew text that was stored in the DB (as part of post content etc.) appears just great. Page Encoding is set to UTF-8, the php files that are the templates are also UTf-8 encoded and appear just fine in a text editor (the hebrew characters) - all site uses the same font...

Can anyone help me with this mistery? Site in question is: shanilasser.com

Answer 1

Well, thanks to a suggestion from one of my mates I resolved the more critical problem (2) of the Hebrew text displaying in gibberish.

All I needed to do was to re-encode the files as UTF-8 without BOM (they were encoded as UTF-8 (plain)). I re-uploaded these files to the server and Voila, everything was back to normal.

Problem #1 is not so critical as even though the selection box doesn't appear the site still behaves as though it is set to be in Hebrew (I guess the WP_LANG did it's magic in any case).

Thank you all for giving a look.

I would appreciate if anyone has any idea why this re-encoding was actually needed, obviously the files worked perfectly before, so why was this change necessary?

All the best!