I’ve had a few reports come in that people using the AWSOM News Announcement plugin or Pixgallery have been having some issues displaying different language types, most notably Asian or other non-English based character sets. The fix for these issues with AWSOM plugins, or any other plugins displaying this phenomenon, is within the WordPress database. When a database is set up in MySQL one of the things you can assign to it is the language encoding type. In addition, all of it’s fields and tables can also be assigned a language encoding type. By default MySQL utilizes Swedish as it’s encoding type (MySQL was developed in Sweden). WordPress typically tries to set up it’s database as UTF-8. In some cases this doesn’t work right, especially if the admin has updated their version of WordPress continually from a version previous to WordPress 2.1.x where this wasn’t defined.

So, the fix is to go to the database directly though phpmyadmin or another database editor and change the language type for the affected Tables and fields to the language type that you need to display. For AWSOM plugins it’s pretty obvious which tables are for what plugin by their name (I make great pains to place the plugin name as the table name)

In extreme cases you can contact me to help you out, but the best bet is to do a google search for how to use phpmyadmin.