All the .po files are now in UTF-8! For information on editing UTF-8 files on Unix, see <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html> If you just want to convert it back to your native encoding to edit and then convert again to UTF-8 to commit, please see the scripts in gnome-i18n/UTF-8, for example export ENCODING_TO=ISO-8895-15 utftopo fi.po emacs fi.po potoutf.sh fi.po cvs commit fi.po An alternative is to use the msgconv utility bundled along with gettext package >= 0.11. If you need help with this, ask, but please don't commit non-UTF-8 files here.