Sounds like a difference in default charset between the servers.
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Charset-server.html

If you now have your original data then all is well. If you only now have a default install then you can do another export/import but this time do an Update or Replace export since you already have the tables.

You can edit the export file to remove the charset= option. I don't know about wordpad but it should work as well if it doesn't change anything in the file except what you changed.

I tried uploading the local (filled) database tables to remote with using the 'replace' and 'update' possibilities.
None of that works.
Get the same message.