My answer to "German Umlaute transformed to chinese signs :-)"

This is my answer to a Question on Support site for LampCMS project

OK, since you mentioned the error from iconv, I suspected that you may not have mbstring extension on your php. The way it is setup now is that the program uses mbstring to handle utf-8 related functions but then if the server does not have mbstring, it uses iconv as a fallback option.

So basically on this server iconv is never used because we have mbstring, which usually handles multibyte string parsing better.

This is just one the the possible reasons for your errors. Just look in your phpinfo() output as see if you have mbstring enabled.