I am dealing with a Brazilian customer where the data is in Portuguese language.

My application is responsible to read the data through web-service calls and store it in our database. The issue that I am currently facing is the Portuguese characters are not getting identified as it is and is stored in my database as a special character.

I am using MySQL database with all tables configured as collation UTF-8. I tried manually inserting Portuguese character into my database and it worked. So I am suspecting its java who is converting the Portuguese characters into special character.

Also, my application is using Hibernate for database operations.

I am able to get the character as I see in logs and the issue reside while trying to store that data in database.

```
Eg: Original characters: Gerãt
    Database characters: GerÃ£t

```

What configurations or setting or changes I need to do to my database so that I can capture the data in Portuguese language as it is?