Schwerwiegender Fehler.

You could - if you use filezilla - also take a look to the transfer setting.

Database table encoding should not be relevant here. I would not change anything here.

As for saving in UTF-8 I guess the problem is that your editor saves the BOM at the beginning of the file but you need the file to be saved in UTF-8 without the BOM. If you haven't changed anything in the files I would suggest to upload the original languages files taken from the German Language pack zip archive again.

The other files of Elgg seems to be saved in us-ascii. So I think it's best to keep them in that encoding format (though I never had any issues when saving them in UTF-8).

Byte order mark

Many Windows programs (including Windows Notepad) add the bytes 0xEF, 0xBB, 0xBF at the start of any document saved as UTF-8. This is the UTF-8 encoding of the Unicode byte order mark (BOM), and is commonly referred to as a UTF-8 BOM, even though it is not relevant to byte order. The BOM can also appear if another encoding with a BOM is translated to UTF-8 without stripping it.

The presence of the UTF-8 BOM may cause interoperability problems with existing software that could otherwise handle UTF-8; for example:

• Older text editors may display the BOM as "" at the start of the document, even if the UTF-8 file contains only ASCII and would otherwise display correctly.
• Programming language parsers not explicitly designed for UTF-8 can often handle UTF-8 in string constants and comments, but cannot parse the BOM at the start of the file.
• Programs that identify file types by leading characters may fail to identify the file if a BOM is present even if the user of the file could skip the BOM. Or conversely they will identify the file when the user cannot handle the BOM. An example is the Unix shebang syntax.
• Programs that insert information at the start of a file will result in a file with the BOM somewhere in the middle of it (this is also a problem with the UTF-16 BOM). One example is offline browsers that add the originating URL to the start of the file.

If compatibility with existing programs is not important, the BOM could be used to identify if a file is in UTF-8 versus a legacy encoding, but this is still problematic, due to many instances where the BOM is added or removed without actually changing the encoding, or various encodings are concatenated together. Checking if the text is valid UTF-8 is more reliable than using BOM. The Unicode standard recommends against the BOM for UTF-8^[26]. In Japan especially, "UTF-8 encoding without BOM" is sometimes called "UTF-8N", and is distinguished.

...

UTF-8 can encode any Unicode character, avoiding the need to figure out and set a "code page" or otherwise indicate what character set is in use, and allowing output in multiple languages at the same time. For many languages there has been more than one single-byte encoding in usage, so even knowing the language was insufficient information to display it correctly.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8

Thank you all very much!! Now it works. It was the BOM... I really should have checked this earlier..

My pleasure.