Entering foreign characters into MySQL

Hi all I have a bulgarian/spanish excel file that I have to import to a mysql database. Since I can't save it as csv without replacing the foreign chars with (???????) I saved it as unicode text. Next, I thought I would replace the (\t) with (;) and all the foreign chars with the &#xxx;. The problem is that I still get (????) instead of the &#xxx;&#xxx;&#xxx;&#xxx;&#xxx; word. Can anyone help Thanks Mario