This is similar in concept to MPCHANGES-24. The encoding of the original project.xml file is not preserved when it is written back after the transformation. This means that my file was converted from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8, which is the default encoding used by dom4j. Without a UTF-8 compliant editor I can't edit the file any more, because I use non-us-ascii character in the file. The solution should be similar and the place to make the change is in this file: http://svn.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/maven/maven-1/plugins/trunk/release/src/main/org/apache/maven/release/AbstractPomTransformer.java The method write() needs to get a hold of the original file's encoding, and do format.setEncoding(<original-encoding>);