NText Column Text Encoding/decoding

Hi,

I have a table column type as nText, however there are some Chinese character stored in that field and it is a messed up as it is not readable.

In my vb.net code, I did Convert to unicode by getting the byte of each character and encode it with UTF8 e.g:


Public Shared Function ConvertToUnicode(ByVal s As String) As String


' Convert To Unicode

Dim MyBytes As Byte() = Encoding.Default.GetBytes(s)

Dim GBencoding As Encoding = System.Text.UTF8Encoding.UTF8

Return GBencoding.GetString(MyBytes)

End Function


This works well but ,the problem is that it slows down the process quite alot, and I wonder are there any text encoding method I can use in SQL that can run when i do the SELECT Statement?


SELECT
Convert(MyNTEXTColumn)
....
something like that?

Thanks.
Jon