I had exactly the same problem with an ASP.net project.
Originally I tried connecting to the database using the Microsoft.Data.ODBC namespace, and I got a series of questionmarks when reading from or writing to the database.
I downloaded the MySQL connector net 1.07 from:
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/1.0.html which solved the problem - all foreign language text is displayed correctly.
I didn't have to make any changes to the database (collation etc.), but I had to change my code that made calls to the database to use the MySql.Data.MySqlClient namespace instead.
The object model is pretty much the same as the Microsoft.Data.ODBC one...
I have no idea why the one works and the other doesn't, but it's clearly not a database issue.
Trouble is my ISP doesn't have the MySQL connector installed, so I'm back to square one trying to get this to work with Microsoft.Data.ODBC
If anyone has a solution please help!