libiconv is a character set conversion library that provides an iconv()
implementation for use on systems which don't have one, or whose
implementation cannot convert from/to Unicode.

It provides support for many encodings and can convert from any of
these encodings to any other, through Unicode conversion.

It has also some limited support for transliteration, i.e. when a character
cannot be represented in the target character set, it can be approximated
through one or several similarly looking characters.  Transliteration is
activated when "//TRANSLIT" is appended to the target encoding name.

libiconv is for you if your application needs to support multiple character
encodings, but that support lacks from your system.