I'm using a resourcebundle to read a properties file based on locale. (Lang_en_US.properties, ..)
The resourcebundle is read as iso-8859-1 (standard?).
ResourceBundle rb= ResourceBundle.getBundle("Lang", locale);
The resourcebundle is then used throughout the Spring/JSF web-application to generate the front-end text.
<h:outputText value="#{msg['message.example']}" />
But I believe this is irrelevant, as debugging shows that the text is already gibberish right after rb getMessage is called.
// returns gibberish:
log.trace(rb.getMessage("l_SampleText"));