What encoding I should choose for transcriptions?

My friends and I are developing an app for iphone and android. We need to work with word transcription. What encoding (or even special font) we should to choose to show correct word transcription in our applications?

UPDATE (Dec 14, 2011): I would like to provide more info. I try to read some transcriptions from Muller dictionary (http://sourceforge.net/projects/xdxf/files/dicts-XDXF/sdict05/comn_sdict_axm05_mueller24.tar.bz2/download) and got problems with some characters. I check dictionary file encoding with enca

~/mueller24 % enca dict.xdxf                                                           
Universal transformation format 8 bits; UTF-8

One of problematic word is a 'painter'. When I open dictionary file in emacs I see:

enter image description here

With data works our script written in ruby. It parses this transcription from dictionary and store in database. And after that it took this transcription from database and write it as json to files (utf-8). If I open this file in text editor I see it as this string \u0445peInt\u255a

And if I parse it in my app and show on screen it seems like that:

enter image description here

Where is the mistake? I suppose that problem in parsing dictionary file. Than how to parse it correctly?

Solution

UTF-8 (compact, and backwards-compatible)