There are alternative solutions:

The best one is to use UTF-8 locales on the remote side, but this is not always possible: multibyte characters need to be supported (by the OS and the applications), the corresponding locales must be installed, there may be annoying bugs and so on... Moreover, SSH has no standard way to transmit the charset; and doing something automatically may be tricky. Note: transmitting the LC_CTYPE environment variable works with most platforms, but not with the N810 (because UTF-8 is implicit here thus doesn't appear in the locale environment variables -- see output of "locale -a").

The screen utility can do transcoding. Same possible problems as above, except that applications that will run in screen don't need to support multibyte characters.