@smacdonald2008 This is an old thread but something that just landed on my plate. A solution I had in mind feels wrong but I wanted to get the community's opinion. What if production author simply had a replication agent to the Stage environments?

Thanks for your response Jörg. The LOCALE of my site was getting set correct.

Thanks for your response Jörg. The LOCALE of my site was getting site correct. I don't like to say it but the ole' turn the server off and back on again fixed this solution.  Sorry to waste time  

Good thinking Singaiah. I came across this in my struggles and tried try this already. My configuration was already set to UTF-8.

Hi all, I've been working on this issue for a few days now. Honestly just going for a 'sounding-board' type method here to see if anyone's comments spur an idea. I have inherited a project with the idea of redesigning and upgrading as time goes on. Everything is going fairly swell except for German ...