I work on an app that gets distributed via a single installer containing multiple localizations. The build process includes a script that updates the .ism string table with translations for each supported language.

This works fine for languages like French and German. But when testing the installer in, i.e. Japanese, the text shows up as a series of squares. It's unlikely to be a font problem, since the InstallShield-supplied strings show up fine; only the string table entries are mangled. So the problem seems to be that the strings are in the wrong encoding.

The .ism is in XML format, with UTF-8 declared as its encoding, so I assumed the strings needed to be UTF-8 encoded as well. Do they actually need to use the encoding of the target platform? Is there any concern, then, about targets having different encodings, i.e. Chinese systems using one GB-encoding versus another? What is the right thing to do here?