When creating a multilingual website I've realized, non-English unicode characters are not supported by the Grid's toolbar buttons. The toolbar won't be created and the Grid's setup cancelled. So, also no read function called or anything else. Strangely it also killed the functionality of my Razor DropDownList for language selection despite no connection other than both using JavaScript.
This problem should be resolved by specifying utf8 for file character encoding. Try that and if you still experience issues, contact our support for assistance.
I have been able to use all special characters by saving the .html in a particular encoding. Kendo UI works perfectly with accents and any ASCII character