Switch encoding of terminal with a command

One of the servers I quite often ssh to uses western encoding instead of utf-8 (and there's no way I can change that).

I've started writing a bash script to connect to this server, so I won't have to type out the entire address every time, but I would like to improve this script so it also changes the encoding of the terminal window correctly.

The change I need to do can be performed using the mouse by navigating to "Terminal"->"Set Character Encoding..."->"Western (ISO-8859-1)". Is there a terminal command that does the same thing, for the current terminal window/screen?

To clarify:
I'm not interested in ways of switching the locale of the system on the remote site - that system is administered by someone else, and I have no idea what stuff might depend on the latin-1 encoding there. What I want to do is to let this terminal window on my side switch character encoding to the above mentioned, in the same way I can do with my mouse and the menus.

Solution 1:

You are looking for luit which is designed for this purpose:

$ luit -encoding ISO-8859-1 ssh remote.host

It will convert the output of the ssh command to UTF-8 so you don’t need to change the encoding of the terminal.

Solution 2:

First edit current locales in your favourite editor

sudo gedit /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local to something like

en_GB.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_GB.ISO-8859-1 ISO-8859-1
en_US.ISO-8859-1 ISO-8859-1

Then run sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

Then set terminal with LANG=en_GB.ISO-8859-1

Hope that works