All arguments for X Window System functions that are specified to be in the Host Portable Character Set are translated between EBCDIC and ASCII by a translation between code page IBM-1047 and code page ISO8859-1. All single-byte character set string arguments to X Window System function calls that are not locale-dependent (do not have names starting with Xmb or Xwc) are also translated between EBCDIC and ASCII using code page IBM-1047 and ISO8859-1. In addition, properties of type STRING passed to XChangeProperty are translated to ASCII before transmission to the server.

These translations are performed on data being transmitted to the server and on data received from the server that is being returned to the application.

The arguments to X Window System functions of the type XChar2b are not translated. This includes such functions as XDraw16, XDrawText16, and XTextExtents16.