Not sure what to say, I have heard from other users that have set MySQL to different languages that don't seem to have an issue with it, but that might require some reworking of your database. Maybe switching the language to UTF8 would do the trick since that's supposed to be able to handle everything.
are you still working on that issue?
I have a quite similar problem with special characters like äöü... I changed a lot to utf-8 and even used utf8_encode (PHP) in the code. The result is I get everything displayed fine (at least seems to) but it gets written back into the database totally messed up (i.e. if the agent adds a comment).
If you have any new infos I would be glad to hear them...
In this case it displays the data fine, but in the db the special-characters appear cryptic. Therefore I still can't export the data from the db without mistakes.
Sometimes the browser or terminal changes the character encoding automatically.
I am so confused...