Database Encoding Conversion (to UTF8)

[jerometam]

I've a forum in Chinese Traditional, using big5 encoding for display and in the database setting, it is by default utf8 and using latin1_swedish_ci as connection and collation.

My problem comes here... I want to change the whole forum's encoding to utf8, matching my site, but I dunno how to dump the database with the right encoding and how to restore it as utf8...

I've tried minisqldump, but I'm not sure whether it provide me the abaility to change the character encoding...

Could anybody help me?

[jerometam]

When I use phpMyAdmin to dump the database in iso-8859-1 encoding, I can view the chinese words correctly, but if the encoding is not specific, it seems that the server is dumping the database in utf8, and I can no longer read the chinese words.

is there any method to dump the database in is0-8859-1 (latin1) rather than using phpMyAdmin? since my database is too large for not having time out with PHP scripts.

and the second question is...

after I've dumped the database in latin1, I should be able to read them as Chinese, and how could I put them back to the db, so that it is converted to utf8?