I spent a few frustrating hours trying to sort this out. I had utf-8 xml files with Irish language characters in them. Whenever I moved them from Windows to my own web hosting which uses FreeBSD the special characters did not come across. I could not cut and paste between Windows and a putty session on the FreeBSD box either.
I found the character set translation options in putty, under Window->Translation which allowed me to select utf-8.
I then had to set the following options in my .login_conf file in my home directory.
me:\
:charset=UTF-8:\
:lang=en_US.ISO_8859-1:
Top tip, the FreeBSD man pages show the above with the lang settings as de_DE, and if like me you cut and paste blindly without thinking you get a crash course in german Das Kommando ist ubekannt.