Unicode characters displaying as ? after import using WP Clone

I wanted to add this as a comment because I want to be brief, but SE will not let me do it since I just signed up. Anyway, I just faced the exact same issue you are facing. This blog post helped me: http://theblogpress.com/blog/seeing-weird-characters-on-blog-how-to-fix-wordpress-character-encoding-latin1-to-utf8/ As well as this thread: Character encoding issue after changing servers … Read more

Load plugins’.mo and .po files from a directory

This is, in fact, already available by default. If specific locale isn’t available in plugin’s folder WordPress will try to fallback to languages directory. It is defined by WP_LANG_DIR constant and for plugins the default location would be wp-content/languages/plugins. Note that name is expected to follow the specific format: name-locale.mo.