Would there be any objections if we standardize and convert all message files to UTF-8 encoding?
Many large multi-language projects like Wikipedia only uses UTF-8. If we convert everything to UTF-8, we can utilize the same translation techniques and platform (betawiki) as Wikipedia. This will be a huge advantage and make it much easier to localize this software.
Note that UTF-8 is a superset of ASCII. Since plain ASCII is also valid UTF-8, no conversion needs to be done for English nor any other existing ASCII text.