How are foreign characters or emojis translated and segmented?

By default, when you send Bandwidth messages that use only GSM-7 characters, your messages are encoded as GSM-7 when sent from the Bandwidth network. For languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or Cyrillic alphabet languages requiring Unicode characters beyond the GSM standard, these characters require UCS-2 encoding and Bandwidth will encode your message as UCS-2 before sending the message. 

You are charged for each message segment based the encoding used. A useful tool to see the difference between GSM-7 and USC-2 encoding and splitting can be found here.

In some cases, a destination operator may need to encode for handsets from GSM to USC, but you will only be charged on how Bandwidth segments your message based on your content as described above.