diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
index c8acd10815a..40c912fb830 100644
--- a/.gitattributes
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -51,8 +51,11 @@ tests/roots/test-pycode/cp_1251_coded.py dos
 
 # Non UTF-8 encodings
 tests/roots/test-pycode/cp_1251_coded.py working-tree-encoding=windows-1251
-tests/roots/test-root/wrongenc.inc working-tree-encoding=latin-1
-tests/roots/test-warnings/wrongenc.inc working-tree-encoding=latin-1
+
+# Encoding test files - treated as binary to prevent encoding conversion issues
+# These files contain intentional Latin-1 encoded content for testing Sphinx's encoding handling
+tests/roots/test-root/wrongenc.inc binary
+tests/roots/test-warnings/wrongenc.inc binary
 
 # Generated files
 # https://github.com/github/linguist/blob/master/docs/overrides.md