Deploy the attached application to FSW 6. Inside the application, modify the META-INF/switchyard.xml file to point to a directory on your local system: < file:binding.file name="file1"> < file:contextMapper includes=".*"/> < file:directory >/Users/dboeren/tinput</ file:directory > < file:charset >ISO-8859-15</ file:charset > < file:consume/ > </ file:binding.file > Turn on message trace (org.switchyard.handlers.messageTrace.enabled=true) and copy the attached ISO-8859-15.xml file into the watched directory to trigger the test. With message trace on, the character encoding is modified. With message trace off, it is not. Look at the "nachname" field in the XML for a good example, with correct charset encoding it should look like this: <tns:nachname>äßHödl</tns:nachname> mweiler had a proposed fix but it does not seem to solve the issue. I am attaching it for reference as it may provide a good starting point.