Symptoms

Non-English characters that is inserted during workflow transition displayed as two characters . However, non-English Characters inserted during Issue Edit is correctly inserted.

Diagnosis

1. In the JIRA System Info , the "webwork.i18n.encoding" is not configured as UTF-8

Cause

Character encoding used by one of the JIRA components is set to use encoding that doesn't support given characters.

Resolution

1. Backup JIRA database

2. double confirm the value of "webwork.i18n.encoding" in the database

   SELECT * FROM propertystring where ID in (SELECT ID FROM propertyentry where PROPERTY_KEY='webwork.i18n.encoding');
   

   take note of the ID return to be use in the following update query

3. update database manually to use UTF-8

   UPDATE propertystring SET propertyvalue="UTF-8" WHERE ID=<ID>;
   

4. Restart JIRA