Preserving accented characters when unzipping the tar.gz file

[lobsterman]

When I tar the archive roundcubemail-0.1beta2.1.tar.gz (tar xvfz roundcubemail-0.1beta.tar.gz), then go look at the language array in localization/index.inc, the accented characters are all gibberish. This is on a Mac G4, OSX 4.x The program works fine when set up on my site, but I need the French to display properly. What am I doing wrong here?