O arquivo é exibido corretamente se você cat (ou usou head para encurtar a saída)?
Acho que a chave para tornar less a exibição correta do arquivo é definir LANG ou LC_ALL corretamente. Em seu sistema local e no sistema remoto, compare os valores dessas variáveis e veja se elas são diferentes, e se alterar o remoto para fazer a diferença faz a diferença.
Na página less man (observe a última frase):
If neither LESSCHARSET nor LESSCHARDEF is set, but any of the strings
"UTF-8", "UTF8", "utf-8" or "utf8" is found in the LC_ALL, LC_TYPE or
LANG environment variables, then the default character set is utf-8.
If that string is not found, but your system supports the setlocale
interface, less will use setlocale to determine the character set.
setlocale is controlled by setting the LANG or LC_CTYPE environment
variables.
Finally, if the setlocale interface is also not available, the default
character set is latin1.
Control and binary characters are displayed in standout (reverse
video). Each such character is displayed in caret notation if possible
(e.g. ^A for control-A). Caret notation is used only if inverting the
0100 bit results in a normal printable character. Otherwise, the char‐
acter is displayed as a hex number in angle brackets.