We use E<> for characters like è, é and so on. I don't know if this is good for other languages (I think not).
You could have just used literal è and é characters -- everything you need for Italian is in Latin-1, which is (to make a long story short) the default for Pod. Any pod parsers/formatters that can't cope with that notion deserve to be driven out of town.
Anyway, to deal with languages that aren't a good fit with Latin-1, I'm working on a =encoding directive for Pod that will mean you can have documents in an arbitrary encoding -- you could write your Chinese stuff with "=encoding big5", Thai stuff with "=encoding iso-8859-11", etc. (Having more than one "=encoding" declaration per document is probably forbidden.)
But if you're talking about having documents where each document contains arbitrarily many-and-different languages, presumably Unicode is the way to go, presumably with a happy "=encode utf8" directive at the top.
-- Sean M. Burke http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/
