As far as I am concerned, I want everything on my computer to be encoded in UTF-8, including my file names. To that end, I have set the locale on my Kubuntu sytem to be "en_US.utf8". Other applications, Emacs, the file dialogs in Firefox etc, respect this encoding. For some reason, it looks like Dolphin and the file opening dialogs in other KDE applications think that my file names are in some ancient ISO Latin encoding. The file names that are in UTF-8 encoded Chinese thus end up displayed as garbage in Dolphin. Anyone know how Dolphin decides what encoding the file names are in and how to convince it to use UTF-8?

Is KDE using a font which has all the necessary characters to render the filenames in question? I'm surprised at any mention of a system using anything other than UTF-8, as Qt doesn't support anything else for filenames - and by extension neither does KDE.