Help with international chars

I have an Javabased IRC chat on my forum, and when you log on to the chatroom it uses the username from the "$bbuserinfo[username]" variable. This is working ok until a member with a username that contains swedish chars "åäö" logs on to the IRC server, the IRC server is not supporting international chars.

Can i translate the international chars to the common chars A-Z ?

example:

Username "Göran" becomes "Goran" in the chatroom

is this possebly?

According to freddie, you can international chars from the IRC deamon. I don't know how its done though.