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To work with language then, you need to convert back and forth all the time. This is hard to maintain and increases the chances of introducing human error.
The Details
The standard approach uses the ResourceBundle API in combination with properties files which contains externalized text. The ResourceBundle API will load the proper text based on the current Locale and the default (fallback) locale.
The problem is that at the bottom layerit's core, the ResourceBundle API uses Properties#load(InputStream) method to load the properties files. This method uses by default the ISO-8859-1 encoding. This is explicitly mentioned in its javadoc as well,
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