encoding for i18n

[Ingolf Jandt]

I am wondering which encoding to use for Localizable.strings-files. 
GNUMail and GWorkspace use Latin-1. As I use an @UTF-8 locale, I had 
to recode their files. (Else they complained ".../Localizable.strings 
does not contain string data" or sth similar and switched back to 
English.) Terminal and AddressManager use 7-bit enc with explicit 
'\u...' tags. Portable but very unhandy to write.

So my question is: Is there an 'official' or proposed format for 
Localizable.strings? If not, there definitivly should be one explicit 
encoding -- guaranteed to work independantly of the locale setting. If 
it exists, it should be followed more closely.
(Of course I would try to be helpful in conversion.)

Ingolf