Preserving MT file naming

First, I need to say I’m a total newbie with PHP, so some of the questions I’ll come up with might sound pretty stupid. You’ve been warned! ??
I have been considering moving to WP from MT and have done some testing, particularly importing my MT files to WP.
Two problems I see/foresee:
1. My blog is bilingual: French/English. All the accented characters go out of whack when I import. I suspect it has to do with the fact my current files are using charset=iso-8859-1, while WP is set with UTF-8. Having read that I should stick with UTF, any way I can import without having to then manually redo all accented characters?
2. As I won’t only be changing my blogging tool but also my domain name, I would like to minimize damage due to the move. I’ve pretty much found all instructions on how to work with redirect 301 in htaccess and some mod_rewrite stuff to handle redirecting without losing all the rankings and messing up all the links to my current blog, BUT one of the things that would make life a LOT easier would be for the filenames to remain the same. However, I can’t begin to figure if that is possible with the import, and how.
Anyone out there with help/suggestions?