Tricky: How to quote in non-english languages?

[Julian Turner]

Hi,

I was just approving Markus Mayr's excellent work on the German
translation of the Ubuntu Quick Guide when i discovered the following
sentence: "Bei GNU/Linux werden dazu 'Virtuelle Konsolen'
verwendet."
Now the problem is that we should generally take care that all markup
stays in the translation in order to get correct formatting. But using
'apostrophes' to highlight quotes ist just wrong in German. You may only
use „Zitat“, »Zitat« (inversed french quotes), ‚Zitat‘, or ›Zitat‹ (see
[1]).
We definitely need a policy on how to handle quotes. I am also pretty
certain that problem (or a similar one) exists for other languages too.
Can any person confirm this for her language?
So, let's do a brainstorming on how to handle quotes. Is it possible to
replace ' with a meta-tag like "e; and then have those quotes
be shown in the right style for every particular language?

[1] http://webdesign.crissov.de/Typographie#Zitieren

Regards,

Julian