Wrong words translation - Magento 1.8

Question

I am facing problem while translating text, I have two stores views, English and French. On French store view the text is translated with special characters. ex:

Qty = Qté
Recently added item(s) = Derniers articles ajoutés.

It need to display "Qté" and "Derniers articles ajoutés" respectively. I have added all the translation words in:

app\design\frontend\THEME\default\locale\fr_FR\translate.csv

But no success. I don't want to translate this with inline translation functionality.

Why is this happening any idea?

Answer 1

This is the utf-8 encoding problem !

You have wrong encoding either in your IDE, database or in documents translation files. Ensure that the encoding is utf-8 in :

IDE while editing: choose the utf-8 encoding

Database: -> app/etc/local.xml <initStatements><![CDATA[SET NAMES utf8]]></initStatements>or <charset>utf8</charset>

Database should looks like:

        <default_setup>
            <connection>
                <host><![CDATA[localhost]]></host>
                <username><![CDATA[db_user_name]]></username>
                <password><![CDATA[db_password]]></password>
                <dbname><![CDATA[db_name]]></dbname>
                <initStatements><![CDATA[SET NAMES utf8]]></initStatements> //<---
                <model><![CDATA[mysql4]]></model>
                <type><![CDATA[pdo_mysql]]></type>
                <pdoType><![CDATA[]]></pdoType>
                <active>1</active>
                <charset>utf8</charset> //<---
            </connection>
        </default_setup>