The current ODBC driver returns whatever data you put in the database. It is up to the application to know which character set the data is in.
For example if you use our current SQL ODBC driver from something like Open Office, you can simply tell the system that the data source uses UTF-8 for its data and everything is handled automatically. This is no different than if your files contained data using other character sets such as Thai, Greek, or Cyrillic.
Unfortunately the most common program people use for ODBC access, Microsoft Excel, does not appear to offer a Character Set option when importing data from an ODBC data source so you need to use some other utility. Excel itself does support opening/importing files with different character sets and provides character set 65001 as an option, however the MS Query tool does not appear to provide any character set selection functionality.