ASCII is not standardized for values over 127, but common implementations use ISO-8859-1.
the iconv and other utilities are described here Almost Everything You Need to Know about Charset Encoding, UTF-8, ISO-8859. Conversion and More
A quick and dirty translation of some characters into standard ASCII can be done with sed:
for ASCII table, see http://www.ascii-code.com/
sed -e 's%^~%$VER=1.45\n~%' \
-e 's%\x91%\x27%g' \
-e 's%\x92%\x27%g' \
-e 's%\x93%"%g' \
-e 's%\x94%"%g' \
