Using the FTP command I transferred an xml file from a Red Hat Enterprise Linux box which happens to be in Europe to another RHEL box in the United States. I didn't specify a transfer mode so it defaulted to ASCII which as far as I understand shouldn't ever translate characters between two Linux boxes, but it did. The file size grew at the destination and vim reported it as a DOS file. I checked and LANG=en_US.UTF-8 on both machines.
Anyone have a clue why this character translation happened?