The error message is raised by the ODBC driver, that's correct.
However, the cause for the problem is in the code that uses the ODBC driver.
Just recently I answered a very similar question in our internal JAM group and the problem there was that the data was fetched into an SQL_CHAR data type.
Instead of this, the SQL_WLONGCHAR should have been used.
See https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms710150(v=vs.85).aspx
I assume a similar thing happens with the DBD::ODBC usage here.