check your template index.php file and see if you have character encoding set
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
for the US characters
or
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-UTF-8" />
for european characters
if your using cpanel file manager it will also ask for it there when editing files.
also make sure you have the doc-type set at the beginning of the template index.php file
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
