Openinig text files with international characters in nautilus

[José Alburquerque <jaalburquerque cox net>]

I have an interesting little question.  I have some text files in a 
folder with international character filenames (ie. the file names 
contain characters such as é,ñ,¡, etc.).  I try to open these files with 
vim from nautilus.  However, it seems that because of the "unusual" 
characters, vim cannot open the files.

If I issue the command (gvim "<filename>.txt") from a gnome-terminal 
(running bash), vim opens it with no problems and displays the name of 
the file (with the international characters) fine at the bottom.  (BTW,  
when I open from nautilus vim shows the filename but the international 
characters are translated to funny characters).

I've been able to find that in the gnome-terminal the shell variable 
"LANG" is defined to have the value "en_US.UTF-8".  If I unset this 
variable and attempt to vi, the filename displayed at the bottom of the 
vim window is again sort of "garbled" as occurs in nautilus.

This sort of leads me to believe that the LANG variable is not defined 
when gnome starts up but is defined in the terminal (I guess from my 
.bashrc).

Would anyone know how I might get nautilus to open these files 
correctly?  I'm running GNOME 2.14 and my system starts in X mode 
running gdm.

--
Sincerely
Jose Alburquerque