Comment 2 for bug 496746

Here's a direct link (via the first link in the bug description) to a sequence of shell commands which will UTF8-ify the databases (worked for me):
http://www.turnkeylinux.org/forum/support/20091204/unicode-characters-turns-redmine#comment-1761

NB. If your mysql root user has a password (which it should!), you will need to modify all the `mysql` and `mysqldump` commands to add a `-p` argument.