MSSQL，编码和PHP

I am using a database with a web-application. The problem is that special characters get encoded wrong on the website after retrieving them with a SELECT statement.

On the website I'm using UTF-8 encoding. On the DB Latin1_General_CI_AS.

How can I solve this? I can't change the encoding on the DB because there are several other applications using it, but changing the encoding on the website could be an approach.

Thanks

EDIT:

I could convert return-strings with the method string utf8_encode ( string $data ). It isn't a very nice approach, is there a way to manage this globally?