The only thing you really need is | <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> | as stated previously. It is always used by the browser to sent request to the server. Even if the encoding option of the browser is forced to an other value. The attribut "lang" in tag "html" is not related to the charset but to the presentation options for date, currency, number... I've never had any problem with english/french applications. I let the browser and server switch between the two of them. I don't use any CharacterEncodingFilter. At least it must be used without "overrideClient" parameter unless you're sure at 100% that all the pages sent to the browser are in the same charset that the one specified. The last time I got such issue, it was related to a database server which was configured with a charset different of the one specified in the web pages. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4054042#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...