Two key things about migrating your site from MySQL v4 to v5

(1) In oder to preserve the unicode encoding of foreign characters, make sure that the v5 database was created with DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 and COLLATE utf8_general_ci (or altered to the above properties after creation) before re-creating the tables and restoring the data.

(2) Use plug-ins to backup and restore data instead of using the Export function of phpmyadmin; funny characters can appear if using the latter method for migrating data from MySQL v4.