On Wed, Jun 11, 2003 at 03:23:35PM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote: > > psql $dbtocreate <<... > CREATE TABLE i18n_translations ( > lang varchar(10), > orig text, > trans text > ); > INSERT INTO i18n_translations(lang, orig, trans) values > ('de_DE', 'public', 'öffentlich'); Is that ö encoded as ISO-8859-1{,5}? Then you should: SET CLIENT_ENCODING = 'LATIN1'; Before sending such characters to the database :-), or send true unicode characters to the backend.