Special Characters In A Dropdown List

I have a web form that needs to be bilingual. It contains several dropdown lists. The "text" and "value" for each item in the dropdown list is retrieved from a database. The logic reads the database and then populates the various dropdowns with logic such as:

dim newItem as new ListItem(textString, valueString)

theDropDown.items.add(newItem)

The problem that I am having occurs when the textString needs to contains special characters such as accented vowels or an "n" with a tilde. I have tried populating the database with HTML-formatted strings such as "Avión", hoping that this would display "Avion" with an accute accent over the "o". Unfortunately it displays "Avión".

How do I get dynamically-created dropdowns to display special characters? If the answer is to simply store the special characters directly in the database, then the question becomes how do I get the special characters into the database? I tried to figure out how to write a T-SQL command such as

update tablex set SpanishName = 'Avion' where id=999

but I can't figure out the syntax to insert an accented 'o' into the string.

Thanks.