Jonathon Delacour [1] wrote a response [2] to my entry about semantically marking up foreign words [3] in HTML (HyperText Markup Language) (and why, when viewing that entry, certain browsers kept asking users to install Japanese Language support). The comments on that response spilled over to another entry Jonathon wrote [4] about the problem.
Reading the comments is interesting as there doesn't seem to be a real consensus as towards The Right Thing to do, especially when using romanji to write Japanese words. Do you use <SPAN> like I do? Or is <I> with the LANG attribute correct? What about <CITE>?
I think we're still quite a bit away from the semantic web [5] at this point.
I think the consensus, and what I'm doing now (and going back and fixing previous posts like this one) is to use <I> with the LANG attribute (and TITLE to provide the translation).
[1] http://weblog.delacour.net/
[2] http://weblog.delacour.net/archives/000832.html
[4] http://weblog.delacour.net/archives/000833.html
[5] http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=semantic+web&btnG=Google+Search