I am working on landers for some foreign countries and trying to get them to display correctly with the translations I've gotten out of Google (I know, I should get them done professionally but this thread isn't about that).
I changed the charset of the index file so the characters display in the file but when I view the page in Chrome, I get a bunch of question marks and boxes that indicate the charset being used can't display the desired character.
Does anyone know a fix for that? It's been suggested that I just screenshot the text and put images in the LP but for the sake of the page remaining responsive and fluid, I'd prefer to have the text show up correctly.
Helppppppppppp! 
You need the ascii character codes for the alphabet characters you want to use. Many sites exist to help, an example would be http://www.accentcodes.com or http://character-code.com/french-html-codes.php - find the character and use the following syntax Ý
If you want to use these characters in a javascript alert box you will need to use unicode escape sequences which look like \u0021;
Use an editor that supports utf8 when copying the info.
You may also need to change your page encoding at the server level if it's not able to display those characters (server settings can/will override charset used).