I don't think that you should have foreign characters in the xhtml. As of the properties files... they should be in ISO-8859-1 that's the standard. Any characters >128 (I think) should be encoded like this \uXXXX (I think). All java IDE's contain a plugin that helps you write your properties file in the language you want and have it converted when you deploy. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4067898#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...