 <p>By default, ISO-8859-1 encoding is used when reading properties files. Characters not available in that encoding must be converted using Unicode escapes ("\u1234"), e.g. using the <a href="http://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/tools/windows/native2ascii.html" rel="nofollow">native2ascii</a> tool. See <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4659929/how-to-use-utf-8-in-resource-properties-with-resourcebundle">this answer</a> to a related question for some more details.</p> <p>Alternatively, you could plug in a custom <code>ResourceBundleLocator</code> which reads properties using UTF-8 encoding. The Hibernate Validator reference guide <a href="http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/stable/validator/reference/en-US/html_single/#section-resource-bundle-locator" rel="nofollow">describes</a> how to do this. As a starting point, you could take <a href="https://github.com/hibernate/hibernate-validator/blob/master/engine/src/main/java/org/hibernate/validator/resourceloading/PlatformResourceBundleLocator.java" rel="nofollow">PlatformResourceBundleLocator</a> and adapt it as per your requirements.</p>