 <p>It seems, that your problem has indeed to do with UTF-8. I analyzed your example pages with firebug, and it revealed, that the html pages contain the <strong>UTF-8 BOM-header</strong>, but the untranslated page contains it twice!</p> <p>These 3 characters ( ï»¿) at the begin of the file are written by your editor, but they won't be displayed. With a HEX-editor you can see the difference, you can also go to the file properties and look at the file size, you will notice that they differ slightly.</p> <p>My recommendation would be, to save the files as UTF-8 <strong>without</strong> BOM-header. Especially the double header makes the IE to switch to the quirks-mode (you can press <code>F12</code> to get the developer tools in IE to see it), and that causes the different rendering. A double BOM-header is wrong in any case.</p> <p>EDIT:</p> <p>Just found a wonderful tool for <a href="http://validator.w3.org/i18n-checker/" rel="nofollow">checking utf-8 BOM and header</a> problems.</p>