The log file encoding is specified by FileAppender.Encoding. It can be configured using the encoding configuration element. Example:
<appender name="FileAppender" type="log4net.Appender.FileAppender">
<file value="file.log" />
<encoding value="utf-8" />
...
The value is the code page name. The corresponding Encoding is obtained using the System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding(string) method. For a list of code pages, see the Encoding class documentation.