Usually when you are using foreign characters or multilingual sites (Joomfish for Joomla) you should change your MySQL collation in order to solve problems with encodings. The most common case is to change your MySQL collation from latin1_swedish_ci to utf8_general_ci.
This can be done by using phpMyAdmin:
1. Enter your cPanel and click on the phpMyAdmin icon in the Databases box.
2. Select the database you wish to manage from the drop-down menu on the left
3. Click on the Operations tab in the top menu of your phpMyAdmin
4. At the bottom of the page you will see the collation option. You can now select a collation from the drop down menu and click on the Go button.
Please note that after your change the collation of a database only the new tables will be created with the new collation. All other tables remain with the collation, they were initially created.
