Helen,

XML uses unicode, so why don't you use unicode for the columns
containing xml text (unicode can of course have all your different
characters in it's single character set) eg

create domain T_UnicodeText as varchar(50) character set unicode_fss;

Of course your problem comes if your client tool does not work with
Unicode. Java is perfect for this but we have not been able to get odbc
to work with unicode (at least on win9x, have not yet tried windows NT).

Dave