MyBB Community Forums

I'm making a European Portuguese translation, because the only one there is is actually mostly Brazillian Portuguese. The problem is this language, like many of them, have characters like this: ç ã õ é á ó. So in the language files I have to insert another code, like instead of ã there is a two letter "code" that I place there and it shows me the correct character. If I don't do this, in the forum it just shows ?? .
What I want is a program that does that transformation for me, or maybe a way to fix this so I don't need the "codes" at all,

If that was confusing (it probably was) please say so.

Please I really need help with this. I just want a way to replace á é í ó ç with the codes so it desn't show ??? on MyBB