I recently ran into a problem where French/Greek characters in my conversion extract file were getting garbled when I trasnferred the file into my unix box using WINSCP.After spending some serious time I figured out that it was an issue with my file encoding. I use editplus a super cool editor for my development purpose. So this is how I solved the problem.

1. Save the xls file into csv format.
2. Open the file in Editplus
3. Now from menu navigate to Document -->> Encoding and file Encoding