CouchDB normally delivers non-latin chars in JSON encoded as \uXXXX entities, that is in most cases meaningless overhead.
Known roundtrip, lists that re-encode responses, is very slow for views and not applicable to replication traffic at all. Good way is to rebuild CouchDB from sources, making these changes: 1. Replace mochijson2.erl with https://github.com/mochi/mochiweb/blob/master/src/mochijson2.erl, that has critical fix 2. Change utf8=false to utf8=true at LOC #95 3. Recompile CouchDB. Voila, now all json responces are utf-8. ermouth
